
F 

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Class L 



Book. 



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ViL^.-iJ " CHICAGO. ILL 



lie Gulf Coast 



LETTERS 

WRITTEN FOR THE NEW ORLEANS "TIMES-DEMOCRAT,' 
BY MR. R. A. WILKINSON. 



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R. 


PUBLISHED BY THE 

Passenger Department Louisville & Nashville R. 
1886. 



In Jbxcn. 
VVis. Hist. SoOf 






'o'c 



IHTRODUCTORY. 



' fj-f E take pleasure iu preseutiug, iu book form, the with- 
in in letters writteu by IMr. R. A. Wilkinsou, of the 
'^j^'' New Orleans Times-Democrat. Those who follow 
Mr. Wilkinson in his graphic description of the Gulf 
Coast (lying on the Southern Division of the Louisville 
& Nashville Railroad, between Mobile and New Orleans) 
will spend a pleasant hour and be amply repaid for the time 
spent in its perusal. 

Although Mr. Wilkinson is a very gifted writer, we 
know from personal experience that he has not drawn upon 
bis imagination in describing the attractions of this coast, 
and that the tourist visiting it \yill find its reality fully up 
to the portrayal. 

Sportsmen will see at a glance that Mr. Wilkinson is a 
lover of the rod and reel, and knows something in regard 
to handling the gun. He could not possibly have selected 
a more favorable location in which to experience the 
delights to be had with the breech-loader or the split, 
bamboo, than the very spots he has so graphically written of. 
This is, truly, a sportsman's paradise ; especially so in the 
winter months, when all other sections are barred on account 
of climatic influences. At this season, this region gives an 
extended field for all outdoor spprts. To the denizens of a 
less favored latitude, the Gulf Coast presents attractions of 
a more varied nature than any other Southern locality. 
The train service of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad 

3 



is of such a character that the cities of New Orleans aud 
Mobile can be reached in a very short time, and at a trifling 
expense. Those locating on the coast will find very low 
commutation rates between Gulf Coast points and these 
cities. It is unlike any other Southern resort ; you can, if 
you so desire, have the New Orleans Times-Democrat, 
Picayune, or Mobile morning papers to peruse at breakfast. 
In a word, you are in the midst of all climatic and sporting 
attractions, and yet by no means isolated. At each of the 
places descri]>ed in Mr. Wilkinson's letters can be found 
telegraph, express, and ticket offices, aud polite and atten- 
tive agents ; baggage is checked betv/een these points and 
all principal cities and towns in the United States. 




LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R. 

English Lookout, La., 1886. 

•tOUR correspondent, accompanied by an artist companion, 
departed from New Orleans in a palatial coach of ti)e 
Louisville & Nashville Railroad two days ago. In leaving 
^ the Crescent City by this route, one, be he stranger or 
home-folk, gets a fair impression of all the various branches of its 
immense business, and has a favorable opportunity to note the 
various phases of its cosmopolitan life. The st irt is at the foot 
of Canal street, the broad boulevard of its fashion, the leading 
tiioroughfare of its population, and the meeting line where the old 
C(>l(ftiial town of French dominion io merged into the more mod- 
ern American city. 

As the train rolls out from the depot on its north-eastward 
journey, the crescent sv/eep of the mighty Mississippi, the empress 
of rivers, is seen to the right. The wide stream bears upon its 
breast, like so many palaces afloat, white and sparkling with glass, 
the fine passenger and freight packets that course the main water- 
way and the many long affluents that reach from mountains to 
mountains of the Mississippi valley. Its banks are lined by the 
long black hulls of ocean steamers from every continent and 
clime, or they are fringed by a naked forest of masts and spars 
standing above brown heaps of cotton bales, rows of sugar hogs- 
head?, and barrels or piles of rice-bags. 

Turning from the fleets of river steamboats, cotton, grain, and 
fruit steamers, stately sailing ships, huge freight piles, hamming 
elevators, creaking derricks, struggling teams, busy longshoremen 
and crews of listless sailors leaning over the dark sides of their ves- 
sels, to the left are seen rising the tall buildings of our largest 
sugar refineries. Near these the handsome Sugar Exchange, im- 
posing rows of mercantile buildings, and extensive barrel factories 
and cooperage establishments, emphasize the fact that here is the 
great Louisiana sugar market. 

A little further on, behind its shrubbery-clad foregrounds of 
the Place d'Armes, stands the quaint old Cathedral St. Louis, 



■ flanked by the more ancient palaces of archbishop and governor. 
' The grassy plot of the Place d'Armcs of ancient days, with its 
; pleasant winding walks and rows and clusters of evergreen plants 
: and trees, is now known by the stranger under the more brusque 

■ and homely title of Jackson Square. 

r The train, with clanging bell, rumbles slowly by long rows 
I of buildings, with low, peaked roofs and heavy-arched columns. 
i They are resonant with the dialect ot every race and nation on 
I the globe, from the taciturn tongue of the native Western Indian 
to the verbose vocalization of the almond-eyed, pig-tailed child 
of the Orient, from the harsh consonant-conquering speech of the 
; Norseman and the Teuton to the melodious and softly-modulated 
; language of the Latin. The rumble of the train can not drown 
I the hum of converse in this modern Babel. This is the famous 
: French Market, one of the greatest curiosities of New Orleans, 
i Leaving behind the French Market, with its wonderful anom- 
aly of sounds and smells, the train stops to make connection with 
Morgan's Louisiana & Texas Kailway, one of the Pacific trunk 
[ lines; and here the Louisville & Nashville Railroad possesses an 
; advantage. Tliey have no transfer between Texas, Mexico, and 
! the extreme West and the cities of the South-east or those ot the 
: North-east, as the Eastern division of the Southern Pacific termi- 
nates where their track crosses it, and passengers step from one 
train to another. 

After a fleeting glimpse at the extensive buildings of the 
' United States Mint, the luxurious residences on the lower end of 
Esplanade street, and some of the largest Louisiana rice-mills, the 
traveler is transported northward through the city down the mid- 
dle of another thoroughfare. This is the old Champs Elysees, the 
"fields of pleasure" that once m.arked the lower boundaries of 
New Orleans, where the provincial people were wont to have their 
evening promenades and meetings. The Americans built up the 
grounds, ran a street out toward Lake Pontchartrain through their 
center, and named it with the less euphonious translation of 
Elysian Fields. 

Finally the train crosses the last drainage canal, and the city 

is left behind, with its outlying cottages and gardens, its distgint 

factories and steeples, and its line of dim masts and smoking fun- 

• nels that marks the sweep of its long river frontage, and the level 



steel roadway lies along the crest of the Gentilly Ridge. This is 
crossed at last, with its farms and gardens and its old sugar planta- 
tions, and the cars suddenly plunge into a piece of typical Louisiana 
scenery. 

Our artist's eyes brighten percpptibly at the picture of this dis- 
mal swanip, where pale cypress trunks tower aloft, straight and 
■round as the pillars of a tall cathedral, supporting their dome of 
:dark green foliage, and looped and festooned with the funeieal 
'ornamentation of the gray Spanish moss, which trails and swings 
to and fro in the air. In the sunless shadow of the forest big black 
pools of water, about which stand, in contorted shape, the hairy 
trunks of the palmetto, bearing fronds of stiff and fan-like foliage. 
'Far away, beyond the railroad clearing, the swamp is filled with a 
.'ghostly gloom, through which the crooked trunks and leaf stems 
of the latania appear as if they were the bodies and outstretched 
.;arms of a petrified race of goblins, standing a mute protest against 
'their perpetual i i prisonment. 

' Betore the solitude of the swamp can become oppressive the 
train gradually emerges into light, and the traveler beholds before 
■him the broad, limitless sweep of the sea-marsh of Louisiana. 
•' It is all a sea of verdure, reaching from the forest as from a 
; shore, and stretching away to the edge of the descending blue sky 
'at the distant horizon. It is a Sahara without its sand, and an 
■ocean without a sail; an endless growth of waving green, with 

• its billows of mangrove bushes, its reefs of reedy brakes, and its 
' islets of bay trees or laurie groves. 

This sea-marsh is intersected by many bayous, and dotted with 

numerous lakes, where green vegetable rafts of lotus leaves and 

lily pads turn slowly with the tide, or float lazilj^ about, blown by 

■ the breath of the salt breeze which comes constantly sweeping in 

from the Gulf of Mexico. 

• A long blast sounds from the locomotive whistle • the train is 
I checked near the bank of a wide and winding bayou, and the 

brakeman opening the coach-door shouts. Chef Menteur. 

1 The Americans have wisely failed to Anglicize the name of 

' this broad pass connecting Lake Borgne, or the " One-Eyed Lake," 

with the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, or " Bridge of the Coach 

•Train." Chef Menteur has a pretty sound in French. In Eng- 

. lish it simply means " Biggest Liar." 

7 



• One of the Louisiana historians, we believe, says that tliis bayou 
was so called because a noted old Indian chief, of an unapproach- 
able talent for mendacity, during the colonial clays pitched his 
wigwams on its banks. Another more plausible reason for its 
singular title exists in the fact that in the days of Louisiana ex- 
plorers it was mistaken for the main entrance from the Gulf or 
Lake Borgne into Lake Pontchnrtrain, having a deep entrance into 
the former lake, through a very narrow channel near the latter. 
It is supposed that some irascible French navigator, after having 
vainly tried that short and apparently practicable route from the 
seacoast colonies to the Island of Orleans, and having had his ves- 
sel turned back by the shoals, impatiently baptized the deceptive 
strait permanently with this opprobrious epithet. Some chroniclers 
state that it also sadly misled Admiral Cochrane and Sir Edward 
Packenham in their fruitless etforts to capture New Orleans during 
the war of 1812. They endeavored to transport troops to the rear 
of the city through the Bayou Chef Menteur in a flotilla of boats 
and barges, but were foiled by the shallow mudplats which blocked 
its channel, and were compelled to put back into Lake Borgne, 
whence Packenham sought the Mississippi river banks, the battle- 
field of Chalmette, and his own Philipp through the Ba^-ou Bien- 
venu, or " Welcome Creek," as it will probably be called a hun- 
dred years hence. 

On the right bank of Chef Menteur, and immediately to the 
left of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, near the supposed 
turning point of the British flotilla, there is an old brick fort called 
Fort M'Comb. It is punctured by many embrasures for light guns, 
surmounted by a pile of brown barracks rising above the crest of 
its low walls, and partially surrounded by a glaces thickly over- 
grown with grass, reeds, and briars. The only garrison the scribe 
and the artist saw in possession was a great gray heron, which at 
the sound of the whistle arose from the verge of the moat, with 
slowly-flapping pinions and harsh croaks of displeasure at the 
temerity of the locomotive in disturbing the solitude of his hermit- 
age; then, settling back, perched upon the parapet, drew one leg 
up to his stomach, sunk his long serpentine neck into his breast- 
feathers, and looked as lonely as if he might have been, in trans- 
migrated sJir.pe, the ghost of old Chef Menteur himself, returned 
to mourn over the graves of his departed tribe. 

8 



Soon "The Chef," as the wordily-ecoiiomical railroad men call 
it, is crossed on a magnificent iron bridge, and the train spfi'ds 
along the solid and firm embankment of stone and shells and earth, 
a great viaduct that modern engineering has built through the 
Louisiana marshes. The rushing cars wake up a few hui dred 
sleepy alligators, basking in the lakes and baj^ous, into stupiii, 
wide-eyed curiosity; scare the little blue herons, or Creole ''c;iii- 
caps," from tiic t.>ps of the mangrove bushes into hurried flight; 
or flush occasionally a purple, red-crowned water rail from his 
i^tately and royal promenade over the floating lily and lotus rafl> ; 
or send clouds of chattering blackbirds off into the bending i-ecd 
brakes. 

Another loud whistle denotes that we are approaching the 
Rigolets, where a few residences of a humbler class, club-houses, 
government light towers, and other architectural surprises, rising 
on gb treacherous a foundation, betoken the fiict that man has here 
gained a firm foothold on the marshes, and can live perfectly free 
from malaria, as the region is well pui-ified by periodic tidal over- 
flow from the Gulf. 

Tiie Eigolets form the main navigable channel from the Gulf 
ot Mexico to Lake Pontch:irtrain. These passes were thus named 
by the knightly Bienville, who, after nuich searching, had found 
in them a means of quick communication between his colony at 
Biloxi and the Mississippi river, near the present site of Baton 
iiouge. Bienville's route to the Mississippi river was along the 
sound, through the Eigolet«, across Pontchartrain through Pass 
Manchac, across Lake Maurepas, through the Baj'ou Manchac and 
into the Mississippi river near the village of the Bayagoula Indians. 
This water route to the Mississippi from Mobile and the seacoast 
was used bj- the French colonists in trading with the Chetimachas, 
Bayagoulas, Natchez, Tunica,, and Yazoo Indian tribes. It prob- 
ably would have been open now, but General Jackson, to blockade 
the British out of the Mississippi, in 1814, felled a whole forest 
into Bayou Manchac ; the Mississippi covered that forest with mud, 
and now the bed of the Bayou Manchac is a sugar plantation. 

Bienville was so delighted at the discovery of this entrance that, 
in his profound gratitude to Providence, lie named it " Les Eigo- 
lets de Bon Dieu," which in English, means " Straits of the Good 
God." Understanding this, one is prone to believe that Bienville 



- '- ' ■ 111 I Ml II . a. It I II III .xj L L. J. <mmm^ 

himself was the distinguished French gentleman who, in the bit- 
terness of his disappointment, called the false passage Chef Men- 
teur. Fortunately, Louisiana has another French geographical 
name, which must be retained, because it can not be translated 
' without frequent injury to the decalogue. 

Stopping awhile at the station to discharge a few pquads of 

: amateur anglers, the train started again, crossing the Kigolets on 

vthe steel bridge, that has for its foundation grouped creosoted piles. 

;' These piles are driven to a depth of seventy and eighty feet in 

: groupsof eight and ten, and banded together with immense wrought- 

iron bands. On these substantial foundations eight spans of steel 

' furnish a safe crossing of this wonderful stream. Leaving Rigolets, 

. and running along a narrow neck of land, with Lake Borgne to 

the <'ast and Pontchartrain to the west, we soon arrive at English * 

Lookout, which is now one of the most noted fishing and hunting 

\ resorts in the South or in the entire country, and is within sight 

of the bravest and bloodiest naval battle ever fought in the Gulf 

i of Mexico. 



t*'^ 




10 



LOUISVILL& & NASHVILLE R. R. 
English Lookout, La^ 1886. 

V^EW of the tourists or travelers, whose journeyinga northward 
'.tni or southward happen to lead them over the sea marsh of 
; §i|;j^ Louisiana, lying along the railroad route from New Orleans 
, % to Muhile, Would imagine that this region had an interest- 
ing history. 

One seeing the white sails of lumber schooners and little fish- 
ing smacks dreamily drifting about the waters of Lakes Pontchar- 
train and Burgne would scarcely realize the fact that the tapering 
tall masts and swelling canvas of war fleets were once seen far 
aw»y in the outer offing ; and that the grass-grown wastes and 
winding bayous ever trembled with the roar and rumble of can- 
non. 

The averaare hunter from other sections would think, too, that 
the region was wholly given up to the alligators, the herons, and the 
marsh-hens, and would scout the idea that it was one of the favor- 
ite winter haunts and homes of the lordly canvas-back, the lus- 
cious mallard, the swift-flying, green-winged teal, and every other 
variety of migratory duck. He would scarcely believe the great 
Audubon himself, if he read that eminent naturalist's words say- 
ing that the fleet American deer frequented such pastures, and 
that every fall the gallant Cervus Virginianus rubbed the summer 
velvet off his horns against the boughs and stems of the man- 
grove bushes; or he would laugh at the statement that the banks 
of its bayous and the brinks of its lotus-fringed ponds were the 
home of the rich-furred otter. 

Yet both the local historian and the Louisiana hunter know 
that the above statements are strictly true. English Lookout is 
now a celebrated field headquarters for Southern sportsmen, and 
more particularly for the devotees of the rod and reel. Seventy- 
two years ago it was the headquarters for the commanders of an 
English force of invasion, and then obtained the name it owns to 
the present day. 

The old Lookout point was in a cluster of pines, which grew 
11 



on a large mound a few yards, cast of the present Louisville & 
Nashvilh; Railroad track. The pines and most of the mound are 
now giine. The old settlers say that some of the troes were blown 
down in the " Last Island storm," August 10, 1856, and that the 
others and most of the material of the mound were used in rail- 
road construction in more recent years. The place is in sight of 
the scenes of the first serious conflict in the fierce struggle for the 
Ciipture (if New Orleans in the war of 1812. 

Oa the mirning of November 14, 1814, a flotilla of Admiral 
C )c^irane's fleet, which, only a short time before, had aided in the 
oipturo and burning of Washington, left Malhoureux Island 
(our American Grass Island), near the mouth of the Rigolets, to 
attack the little American squadron that, under the command of 
Lieutenants Jones and Parker, was placed for the defense of the 
straits and the channel into Lake Pontchartrain. 

American history says tbat the British fleet consisted of forty- 
three barges, mounting forty-three cannons, and manned by 
twelve hundred men, and the Americans had only five barges, 
with as many cannons, and one hundred and eighty-five men. 
After a terrific conflict the American Commander was severely 
wounded and all his boats were destroyed or capture^, the assail- 
ants losing over three hundred men before they achieved their 
Phyrran victory; of our forces but ten were killed and thirty-five 
wounded. These figures might be altered after access to the 
archives of the British war office, but as these are at present in- 
accessible, a reliance must be placed upon our own government's 
return of the comparative lists of casualties. 

After the bloody battle the English buried their dead on the 
cast bank of Pearl river, where one sees the live-oak sheltered 
mounds to the right of the railroad track going northward. The 
old natives say that they have another cemetery behind the 
breastworks on Pearl river, at Jackson's Landing, near the 
mouth of Mulatto Baj'ou. During recent j'ears mouldy skulls 
and rusty musket barrels have been brought, by native fishers and 
hunters, to the club-houses of the Lookout, as grim relics of our 
last war with England. 

The English then established a lookout in the noted clump of 
pines, between Pearl river and the Rigolets, to watch the maneu- 
vers of their distant fleet out in the Gulf, and to get warning of 

13 



any approach of another American floLiUa from Luke Poiit- 
cb art rain. 

English Lookout at the present day bears the appearance of 
quite a little village, with a comfortable railway station, an ex- 
press and telegraph office, one or two refreshment hou-es and 
siloons, several club-houses, an extensive custom-house buildinr, 
with the cross-barred ensign floating from its flagstaff, and the 
Pearl river mail steamer lying at its wharf. 

The celebrity of the place, however, rests upon its fame a> a 
tishiMi: and hunting resort. More on the former, as Lake Cath- 
erine, with its shooting boxes, is nearer the most frequented du^'k 
ponds and feeding grounds. 

Thj shooting in all this region is confined to the colder weather 
of fall and winter; and the hunting fields and flats are mostly 
south of the •■ Lookout," along the branches of the Rigolels, L-dve 
Ccitlterine, the " Seven Ponds and Chef Menteur, and nearer the 
huntsman's headquarters of Miller's, Steiteiger's," and others. 
Nearer English Lookout five deer, run by hounds, have been 
killed in a single hunt. The best snipe grounds are said to be in 
tha vicinity of the Chef Menteur and Pearl river, but the flats 
about Lake Catherine are par excellence the duck-shooters' p;ira- 
d\se, and are consequently subjected to heavy raids by the skilled 
amateur sportsmen of many of the Southern cities. The "blind" 
and point shooting over the decoys furnishes the most enjoya- 
ble of a''l the sport; by flood and field. The brisk norther of No- 
vember or December, with its frosty breath, invigorates the true 
sportsmen with tingling ozone, until his nerves become steel and 
liis muscles tireless. In the light canoe, or hunting pirogue of the 
professional, at early dawn he repairs to his favorite shooting 
point and awaits the coming of good shooting light and the com- 
mencement of the morning flight. The first flock goes whistling 
by in the semi-darkness, showing an indistinct line against the 
dark-gray sky. It evokes a flash of burning powder and the 
resounding boom of the ten-gauge breech-loader, folio v^'ed by a 
welcome sounding thud or splash in the grass or the water. The 
shrill whirr of another fl 'ck, the sweetest music to a sportsman's 
ear, is lieard overhead, calling up a double report from the marsh 
grass ; an apparent echo responds from a distant point, and before 
sunrise on 3 would imao;ine that a small war had broken out in the 



marshes. By noon the flight is over, and the satisfied sportsmen 
return to the club-houses laden with specimens of mallards, teal, 
pintail, canvas back, black duck, and other varieties in quantity be- 
yond the most sanguine hopes of the best hunters of Chesapeake 
Buy and Long Island Sound. 

Eng'ish Lookout is considered one of the best fishing localities 
along or near the coast of the Gulf. Its surrounding waters— the 
KlLTolets, Pearl river, and Lake Bor^'ne — are liberally patronized 
by four limited clubs, composed chiefly of Waltonians from the 
Crescent City, who have, each, separate, and commodious club- 
houses around the railroad station. These organizations are 
known under the names of the " Lookout," " Pearl river," 
"Ballojo," and "Bush" clubs. Beside these, hundreds of the 
citizens of New Orleans and other Southern cities and towns visit 
ihe place, and avail themselves of its splendid fishing facilities. 

The more numerous varieties of fish abounding in the adjacent 
waters are the Southern "green trout," or the black bass, accord- 
ing to Commissioner Seth Green ; croackers and sea trout, which 
count for nothing in those fishing grounds; sheephead, redfish, 
the carancke, cavalle, or jackfish, and the justly-celebrated silver- 
fish, tarpon, or grande ecaile, the gamest fish in the Mexican Gulf, 
or any other part of the ocean for that matter. 

Tbe green trout, better adapted to fresh or slightly brackish 
water than all the other varieties, requires the most alluring bait 
and the most subtle piscatorial art to capture him. He prefers to 
kill his own game ; hence, the angler who wishes to be successful 
in getting him out of his element must employ live bait, sea 
slirinip, cacahao, or salt-water minnows, revolving metal spoons, 
which simulate frog or fish life, or feather and hair " bobs " that 
are made to skip above the surface of the water, as if they were 
water moths or dragon flies dipping for a bath. 

The president of one uf the Lookout fishing clubs captured one 
hundred and thirty-nine green trout in one morning by cautiously 
working along the fl^g roots and the lily pods of the bayous. The- 
green trout in this vicinity run from owe pound to seven pounds 
in weight. Tbe striped bass, a much rarer variety of fish than 
the last named, is frequently caught. The largest landed with 
rod and reel, with a record furnished, was forty inches in length 
and nineteen pounds in weight. 



The slieephead, one of the finest li^h in tlio Gulf of Mexico, 
seems to be a reliable and voracious biter in the Lookout fishing 
region; catches of fifty or sixty a day, by a single flshermnn, are 
matters of such common occurrence as to be considered unworthy 
of comment. He will rise to the veriest tyro's hand, induced by 
no greater attractions than pieces of sea or river shrimp, or frag- 
ments of broken crab. 

The redfish is one of the most beautiful members of the whole 
piscine tribe. When forced at last to leave his congenial element to; 
take his place in the bottom of the fishing boat, he comes up gasping. 
and flashing with crimson and gold, absolutely dazzling in his 
brilliancy of coloring. Game and gallant is the fight he makes 
for his life, straining rod, line, and reel, and exercising all the 
angler's nerve and skill to land him safely, unless he be hung by 
some pot-fisher with a clothes-line and a hook forged in a black- 
smith's shop. The redfish vary in weight from two to forty 
pounds, and are voracious biters and most valiant fighters. 

The caraucke, or cavallo, furnishes an immense amount of fun 
in the catching, and none in the eating. 

The magnificent silverfish is the king of the Gulf and the lakes. 
Away over off the Florida coast they call him the tarpon ; and 
many long legions of his prowess have been printed in the North- 
ern press. Down in the westward Louisiana bays the Creole 
and Dago fishermen rail him the " grande ecaile," or '• big scule," 
and pull for the shore when they hook him, filled with the firm 
conviction, which has become traditional among them, that the 
grande ecaile leaps against his enemy in desperation wheri ne 
feels that he has no chance of escaping the cruel hold of the hook. 

The writer has yet to see a Louisianian who has landed his 
first silverfish with the rod and reel. He would gladly make 
honorable mention of any candidates for such distinction in the 
art piscatorial. A noted disciple of Walton, last season, hooked 
no less than eleven in the Kigolets ; others were towed a mile or 
two backward and forward by these wild horses of the sea. Nearly 
all of the specimens were between six and seven feet in length, 
but not one of them was accurately measured ashore. Silverfish 
tackle is now being conspicuously displayed in the show windows 
of the New Orleans fishing emporiums, and silverfish are now 
biting in and about the Eigolets, and some ambitious angler has a 



briUiiint chance of covering himself with glory by conquering one 
(if these flying, leaping, fl^ishing racers of the Mexican main. 

The fishing around English Lookout is now at its best, and all 
people who may be on piscatorial pleasure bent can find no better 
field for the play of their diversions than is aflforded in the locality 
described. It is strange, when one comes to consider how access- 
ible this spot is to the sportsmen of the country, that compara- 
tively so few care to avail themselves of the finest sport to be had 
in the country. 

The fall and winter fishing near the Lookout is excellent, and 
at that season nearly all of the fish of the Gulf are in their 
best condition, and ready for the dexterous line-casters of the 
Northern lakes, who might come down and teach their Southern 
brethren of the rod and reel how to tackle the tarpon. 





16 



LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R. 

Bay St. Louis, Miss., I88G. 

N the 10th instant the chronicler of this narnitivo, riftei- a 
parting salutation with its sun-browned citizens and sports- 
men, and a regretful glance at the glistening bunches of 
green trout, sheepshead, and redfisli that were being trans- 
ported to the north-bound train, left Louisiana and English Look- 
out and landed in Mississippi, on the east bank of Pearl river. 

Pearl river, flowing from its head of navigation, three hundred 
miles distant, at Carthage, in Leake county, Miss., passes through 
Jackson, the capital of this flourishing and rapidly-growing State, 
afftft-ds a navigable waterway for a fertile cotton country, and 
intersects the great Southern pine belt in its very center. It pen- 
etrates the finest lumber region in America, which, comparatively 
undeveloped, is even now receiving the earnest attention of Mich- 
igan and Minnesota capitalists and lumbermen, who, anticipating 
the early exhaustion of the Northern pine forests, are looking 
southward with a view of transferring the lumber industry of the 
country t<^ a wider and more prosperous field. The river is already 
bordered by many saw-mills, thriving lumber settlements, and 
prosperous towns; and large numbers of sea-going vessels are an- 
nually loaded, in the ofiing in front of its mouth, with yellow pine 
for the Mexican, South American, and European markets. 

The mouth of the Pearl into the Gulf of Mexico, or, more 
directly, Mississippi sound, is surrounded by the sea marsh. Near 
the Louisville & Nashville Railroad crossing, and higher up at the 
confluence of Mulatto bayou, huge shell mounds, covered with 
live-oak groves and forests, rise above the marshes. Seventy odd 
years agathey were used as cemeteries by the English and Amer- 
icans for the interment of slain soldiers and sailors. In prehis- 
toric ages they were apparently employed for the same purpose, 
as skeletons, fragments of pottery, stone hatchets, and arrow-heads 
are frequently excavated from their depths by the shell dealers, 
who boat them away to be sold for paving the streets and drives 
of Southern cities. The constant appearance of oak groves upon 

17 



their crests might induce the belief that they were mounds built 
and planted with trees for the performance of some mysterious 
Druidical rites. But these mounds, according to the testimony of 
archaeologists and conchologists, were there before the alleged T^l- 
tee occupation of Mississippi, thirteen centuries ago, and before 
Noah left the stranded ark high and dry on Mount Ararat. Some 
men of scientific attainments maintain that they were not used as 
places of interment, but that some migbty mundane convulsion, 
which hurled the shells into heaps from the sands of the sea, over- 
whelmed men and beasts that dwelt near the margin of the deep, 
and piled their bodies and carcasses promiscuously with the shells 
into the thousands and thousands of acres of mounds that rise 
above the marshes of Mississippi and lower Louisiana. In these 
modern times men do not stop to inquire whether they were a 
result of one of the freaks of the fabled Deucalion deluge, or of 
Noah's more authentically recorded flood. They pave their road- 
ways with them, and ride smoothly over them in rough coster- 
monger carts or luxurious coaches, and that is enough for all 
purposes of life. They would prove to be of wonderful interest 
to sight-seers from other climes. 

To the eastward of Pearl river broad sweeps of grassy savan- 
nas stretch from the distant pinelands to the sea, down between 
intervening islands and peninsulas of forests. Here are thousands 
and tens of tliousands of acres of magnificent grazing lands, wat- 
ered by hundreds of meandering rivulets and creeks; meadows, 
clad with rich and luxui'iant perennial herbage; dry tablelands, 
sheltered and shaded by clumps and clusters of oak and pine ; and 
undulating swells, v,?hich roll away like the weald of Surrey with- 
out its cuuntless flocks. In Bienville's time it was the natural 
home of the buflaio — the "Terro aux Boeufs," or "Land of 
Beeves." 

For two years after the landing of Iberville, at Ship island, the 
French colonists of this seacost considered buflaio wool and pearls 
the staple commodities of the country. Crozat, the great Parisian 
monopolist, obtained a charter for the exclusive enjoyment of this 
trade. The colonists procured quantities of buttMlo wool, and 
tried to domesticale the buftliloes in pens built of pine po.--ts. 
They never got any pearls worth mentioning, though they scoured 
the Coast in quest of them. It is not improbable that a lew pearl- 

18 



bearing oysters, found by them near its moulb, gave its name to 
Pearl river. 

Some of the ante-bellum residents still call Hancock and Har- 
rison, the seacoast counties of the State, the " cow counties of Mis- 
sissipl." The title is more likely to have descended from the 
presence of great buffalo droves in the region than from the quan- 
tity of domestic cattle once reared here. In Texas and Colorado 
the departed droves of the bison have long since given pi- ee to 
far more numerous and valuable herds of cattle ; and the } ell of 
the Comanche, glutted with the savage butchery of the flying 
beasts, has been hushed by the festive whoop of the cow-boy, 
rounding up the immense herds of fatted beeves for the long cast- 
ward drive. On the Mississippi seacoast the vanished bison has 
not been followed by the fattening beef. The great waste of 
cheap and valuable pasture lands, lying in a long stretch, green 
wi!h herbage and abundantly watered, east of Pearl liver, is not 
utilized. It does not contain one animal, where a thousand might 
roam and grow fat. 

Journeying from Pearl river, and passing the pine-clad plains 
and shores of Gulf View and Toulme, with occasional sweeps of 
sparkling sea seen through the car window, we arrived next and 
stopped at Waveland, one of the many popular pleasure resorts 
of the Gulf Coast. 

• The railroad station at Waveland, a few hundred yards in the 
rear of the center of the beautiful village, is about forty-five miles 
distant from New Orleans. Our party was conveyed to the beach 
and the residence of one of its characteristically hospitable citi- 
zens in his private carriage, and subsequently, in the same vehicle, 
along the entire front of the town. 

This delightful reseirt is well named. The waves of the Gulf, 
with crystal limpidity and white crests, come rippling in from the 
broad summer sea beytmd, leaving the white saniis of the sloping 
beach, and breaking into sparkling foam at the end of their long 
voyage from the distant, unseen southward islands. With bold 
and curving sweep the forest-covered points and headlinds of the 
coast line put out into the waters of the soui'd, as if the bending 
pines and the swaying live-oaks had marched f^rth in troops to 
meet the salt sea-breeze that comes rustling and singing through 

their evergreen foliairc. The shining belt of white sand which 



lies just beyond the foot of the forest, dwindling away in perspec- 
tive to a silvery hair, where the faint purple haze of distance mel- 
lows the woodland to a tint merging into the hue of the sky, is 
hut a dividing line separating the soft shades of coloring in the 
landscape, the pale, cool sea-green of the waves and the deeper 
verdure of the woods. 

The suniiTier villas and winter residences of the inhabitants are 
in harmony with the natural scene. Cottages, whose porch col- 
umns and balcony railings are covered by clambering roses and 
sweet-scented, clinging vines; shadowy, wide-roofed mansions, 
with broad verandas and airy halls, resting at a respectable dis- 
tance back from the beach to give the dignity of great extent to 
the verdant lawns in the foreground; and light structures, built 
by luxury to court the delicious languor that comes stealing in 
\yith the winds from the far-away tropic seas. 

The village extends along the coast in a succession of such hab- 
itations for several miles — milesof sparkling waves, shining sands, 
velvety green banks, and forest-clad headlands. The rude North- 
ern winter never gains a foothold in such a locality ; there might 
be a slow transformation from the vernal brightness of the South- 
ern summer, and the subdued softness of a golden, rich-leaved 
autumn, but here one could never find the skeleton nakedness of 
leafless forests, the fair earth resting under a funeral winding-sheet 
of snow, and the voice of babbling rills and laughing streams 
hushed into frozen silence. 

This is Waveland. Its people have done well to call it so; but 
it is a pity they can not fasten to it a double appellation, denoting 
that it is also the land of the summer breeze. 

When Dr. Kane, the gallant Arctic explorer, spent his two long 
winters, imprisoned in the wreck of the Advance, among the 
stranded ice-floes of the frozen zone, he was often wont to visit 
a certain headland where he could gaze far away southward, to- 
ward home. The Esquimaux called the rocky eminence " Anoa- 
tok," or "the wind-loved spot." If there be an " Anoatok " on 
this coast it must be near "Waveland ; or the name is deserved by 
the entire Mississippi seacoast, where the almost perpetual south 
wind robs the summer solstice of its fervid heat, and the short 
winter of its frosty rigors. 

Waveland has very rapidly increased in the number of its 
20 



houses and its inhabitants within the past few years. There is yet 
a large extent of coast in its vicinity, and less within its limits, 
which could be profitably or advantageously devoted to summer 
residences, winter homes or hotels for Northern tourists. It wiU 
only be a question of time when its growth, as a practical suburb 
of New Orleans, ceases to depend upon the increase of population 
in the Crescent City, though it has advanced rapidly under that 
active stimulus. Its bright future lies not alone in its excellence as 
a summer resort, but in its advantages as a winter abiding place for 
the denizens of a colder clime. 

After a most enjoyable visit to Waveland, our party, honored 
by the accompanying presence of their host and charming host- 
esses, were whirled away over the smooth shell drive bordering 
the beach, seven miles, to the town of Bay St. Louis. 



t. . « ■• 



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L^'- '^: 






s K^W 



21 



LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R 

Bay St. Louis, Miss , I8S6. 

AY ST. LOUIS was entered by Iberville, and its banks 
settled upon by a small French colony one hundred and 

; eighty-five years ago. 

The explorers found a beautiful sheet of water, two 
miles wide at its mouth, and expanding, as it stretched toward the 
interior, between its forest-clad borders. It receives the tributary 
waters of three streams, the Boisdore, Portage, and Wolf river, 
of our day, from the seat, and Jourdan river on its westward 
side. 

The French were fond of sainting their great Bourbon sov- 
ereign in his New World dominions. The grandest river in the 
unexplored continent, the old Indian Mississippi, was called the 
Biver St. Louis. The forest-engirdled bay on this seacost was 
named the Bay of St. Louis, and all the way from Northern 
Acadia to the straggling colonies along the Gulf of Mexico there 
were enough St. Louises to offset the mortal misdemeanors of the 
puissant monarch at home. 

In all this region, strange to say, there appear to be no land- 
marks to perpetuate the names of the knightly men who brought 
the Old World's civilization and arts to a barbaric land — no town, 
village, plain, hill, river, or bay that bears such names as Iber- 
ville, Bienville, Sauvolle, St. Denys, Hubert, Boisbriant, Chat- 
eaugne, Bernard de la Harpe, and other captains and chevaliers 
who won and ruled the country. ^ 

There is a comparatively elevated plateau of an area of ap- 
proximately thirty square miles, that juts out as a peninsula into 
the western side of Bay St. Louis. " It is separated from the main- 
land on the north by Jourdan river, a large, deep stream, washed 
on the south by the waters of Mississippi sound, and fronts east- 
ward on Bay St. Louis. The land of this peninsula is from ten to 
twenty feet above the sea level. As far back as tradition goes this 
immediate section was used by the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Ali- 
bamons, and pther Indian tribes as a summer health resort, and it 

22 



was even visited by the remote Natchez tribe. In the territorial 
days of Mississippi it was frequented by the planters of Adams, 
Jefferson, and Claiborne counties, who visited it by overland road- 
way's and bridle paths. 

The first important settlement was located at the extremity of 
the }»oint, between the waters of the bay and those of the sound, 
the present site of the tov/n. 

In 1814 th-e village was threatened by Cochrane's British flotilla. 

The lamented and learned historian, Claiborne, of Mississippi, 
when here a few years ago, related an amusing incident of this 
attack. Tiie place was defended by three small cannon (at least 
small for these days) and a weak garrison, who were for beating a 
hasty retreat when they saw the overwhelming force of men in 
bouts approaching the shore. An aunt of Colonel Claiborne, then 
residing here, had visited the shore to watch the coming of the 
distiVnt British ; when she heard that the garrison had determined to 
evacuate the place she snatched a lighted cigar from the hands of 
an ofBcer and touched off one of the guns. Finding the place de- 
fended by respectable-sized cannon, the British retired. The 
American schooner, Seahorse, was sent to defend the settlement 
until the military stores collected there could be brought off. The 
British flotilla attempted twice to capture this vessel but failed. 
Returning a third time in great force they would have succeeded, 
but the commander of the Seahorse blew up his vessel, burned the 
stores, and spiked the guns, which were bored out after the war of 
1812. During the civil war the Federal forces threw two of the 
cannon into the sound. The more famous piece was hidden away 
in the back part of the town. Mr. Ulman, a prominent citizen 
of the town, says the last salute it fired was lighted four years ago, 
on the Fourth of July, by the hand of Colonel J. F. H. Claiborne, 
who begged the honor of firing a gun with which a woman had 
scared a British fleet. The gun, with broken carriage and rusted 
barrel, is now lying near the railroad track. 

When the little settlement grew into a town it was called, after 
an ofBcer in the old United States army, Shieldsboro, a name 
which it bore until recent years, when it was rechartered under 
the name of Bay St. Louis. It was an appropriate step to get back 
to a French name; though, to save the necessity of such awkward 
conversational distinctions as the town of Bay St. Louis and the 

23 



bay of Bay St. Louis, it might have been more convenient, at least, 
to have honored some of the men who made history here nearly 
two centuries ago in naming it. 

The presant town of Bay St. Louis is practically a city. It 
has, with its modern suburb of Ulmanville, a summer population 
of between seven and eight thousand; and its winter inhabitants 
number between three and four thousand. It is provided with a 
tine depot and railroad office by the Louisville & Nashville Eail- 
road Company, over whose line it is only fift\' miles from New 
Orleans, and ninety from Mobile. 

The refined Creole population of the Crescent City regard Bay 
St. Louis with great favor, and respond to the exceptional compli- 
ment paid to one of the greatest of their illustrious line of princes 
in its naming by liberally patronizing the resort. Many of the 
families residing there themselves bear the historic names of men 
who have figured conspicuously in the colonization of this portion 
of Mississippi and all of Louisiana. It is here that one can find 
citizens as polished and polite as those that frequent the fashion- 
able boulevards and clubs of Paris; and women as beautiful only 
as Creole women are. 

Bay St. Louis, in the summer, is a little Paris within itself, or 
a fashionable suburb of that lesser American Paris, the French 
part of New Orleans. Even in winter it has a comparatively large 
Creole population. Yet the Saxon race has several thousand rep- 
resentatives in town. 

"The Bay," as the Anglo-Saxon denizens are wont to call it, 
has streets along its water frontage eight or ten miles long, and 
magnificent shell drives extending 'throughout this distance. It 
is a compactly-built little city — as compactly as a partiality for 
shade trees, shrubbery, flower gardens, and grassy lawns around 
its beautiful villas and cool cottages will permit. Its streets near 
the sound and the Bay St. Louis contain large numbers of hand- 
some private residences, and many extensive boarding-houses. 
The largest hotel in the town was burned to the ground seven 
years ago.' There is talk of replacing it by a much larger and 
more handsome edifice, to meet the demands of Northern winter 
travelers and tourists. 

Quite a number of Northerners spent a large portion of last 
winter in the tov/n, and expressed high opinions of the attractions 

21 



of tljis locality as a winter resort. JMany of the fine summer 
boarding-houses are kept open in the winter to accommodate the 
hundred of Northern people who have found this such a pleasant 
winter home. If all the vacant rooms and residences, utilized 
in the accommodation of a surplus population of several thousand 
during the summer, were available during the winter, the number 
of the inhabitants of Bay St. Louis might be kept permanently 
between seven and eight thousand. They might be easily made 
available, as both summer and winter visitors could frequent the 
place, and live at a very low cost for rents, rooms, and board, 
which would result from residences, boarding-houses, and hotels 
being occupied and enjoying a full business during twelve months 
of the year. The times of the two classes of visitors would har- 
monize exactly. The excess of summer population resides here 
from the beginning of June to the middle of October. The 
Northern tourists usually remain in the South from November 
to May. Thus, it is easily seen that Bay St. Louis, with only 
iti present a ^commodations (and they are certainly most excellent), 
can accommodate, every winter, from two to three thousand 
Northern tourists. The day must come when it will find itself 
subjected to the demand of entertaining even a much more 
numerous throng from the North than that; and it seems that the 
people have it in their power to make the date of that day early. 
The long pierheads projecting out into the bay and sound, 
built on pine posts, and ending in ornamental kiosks, pagodas, or 
plain bath-rooms, indicate the fact that sea-bathing is one of the 
most popular of summer luxuries indulged in by the population, 
and groups of big-hatted urchins, with bare legs, faces as solemn 
as if they thought life was but a serious business at best, and, as 
they deemed. that the price of both hard and soft-shelled crabs was 
at a figure that would justify an immediate strike, carrying bas- 
kets of loaded crabs on their arms, inform the stranger that crus- 
tacean delicacies are a perfect drug in the market. Fish-dealers, 
oyster-men, vegetable-venders, and butchers' men, the figurative 
edible-bearing mountains that the hungry Mahomets must seek, or 
go to, in other localities and cities, here come to tho homes and 
hotels of the people. Living is so cheap, or its means are, that one 
need not bow down to his butcher and his baker as to his lord and 
master. 

25 



The aquatic diversions of yachting and rowing are participated 
in by both sexes, though the young ladies seem to prefer to row, or 
be rowed, in Bay St. Louis rather than in the more open sound, as 
in the former sheet the water is smoother. 

It is probably beyond the province of an article like this to 
discuss the municipal government, the chartered associations, 
churches, convents, schools, social organizations, etc., of the town. 
It is sufficient to say that it is one of the best-governed and most 
orderly little cities in the country, the preponderance of its popula- 
tion being refined and highly cultivated. Eeligion and education 
are held at a premium within its limits, disorderly revels are dis- 
countenanced, and the fascinating pleasures of fashionable society 
allowed full sway. 

In the Bay St. Louis suburb of Ulmanville, Mr. A. A. Ulman, 
a leading citizen of the place, has developed a novel industry. On 
a branch of the Severn river, one of the Maryland Senators — pos- 
sibly Mr. Gorman — has a terrapin farm, or a twenty-acre shoal 
staked off from the shore and devoted to the rearing of " diamond- 
back terraphis." Diamond-back terrapins and champagne are 
expected concomitants to any respectable feast in the country 
around about Washington, though they be costly, gout-engi;ndcr- 
ing luxuries. The Maryland Senator has a small fortune in his 
terrapin pasture, and the Mississippi speculator has a limited pat- 
tern of the ftxrm. The celebrated Gulf Island terrapins are ju.^t as 
good as Maryland diamond backs, tasteful Creole gastronomists 
and bon vivants generally well know. In this seacoast terrapin- 
rearing establishment, the proprietor procures his parent stock 
from the sand islands, southward, from terrapin-hunting men and 
dogs. In a large enclosed pond, well palisaded, there are nearly 
one thousand grown terrapins nursing little terrapins, which, on 
reaching maturity, will be shipped to Baltimore, New York, 
Washington, and other cities, and sold for one dollar a head, or 
tail, whichsoever end may be emerging from the shell at the time 
they meet the purchaser's eye. In the same cities, there is an 
eager market for a thousand times the number atinually shipped 
from the Mississippi seacoast. It might be well to suggest that 
this appears to be a promising business, and, as the gentleman said 
to his speculative friend who proposed to send over to Italy for a 
lot of gondolas for the lake in Central Park, " It would be just as, 

2G 



well to got a pair and let theiu breed," as terrapins (not gondolas) 
a:e very prolific. 

Tliere is an extensive woolen factory in the rear of the suburb, 
which is owned and operated by Mr. Ulman. This is dependent 
upon the sheep-raising business in the vicinity of Bay St. Louis, 
which is about the most important of all the stock-growing in- 
dustries pursued along the seacoast. There are several large sheep 
farms, or ranges, conducted on the banks of Jordan river, several 
miles from the Gulf. In that locality, four or five stockmen own 
considerable-sized flocks, the largest numbering about three thou- 
sand head of sheep and the smallest at least a thousand. The 
business is carried on by numbers of smaller herdsmen, who own 
each from a hundred to two or three hundred sheep. The 
" Lake " wool, as the wool from this part of the country is known, 
is considered by Southern buyers and Northern n'ianufacturers to 
be of the finest quality in the country, and always commands the 
highest prices in the market. 

According to the information furnished the writer, this busi- 
ness is carried on without the least care or attention to the flocks. 
They are lett to roam at will without the protection of the herder, 
and generally, for the entire year, without shelter from the 
weather. They may be better for this neglect, and may, conse- 
quently, acquire the hardiness of constitution common to their 
distant cousins, the cervine race, for there is not an epidemic 
sheep disease known in the region. But they are sheared in 
season and out ot season, and oftener left to shed their own valua- 
ble wool. They thrive and grow fat without an enemy, except 
that foe to mankind and friend to the plantation field hand, the 
omnivorous and carnivorous cur dog. But little advantage is 
taken either of their wool-bearing or mutton-producing capacity. 
The time chosen for sheep-shearing is, according to the statement 
of citizens of Ulmanville, when the farmers need a little ready 
money, and the time for converting them into mutton when they 
need meat. This course is pursued within three miles of a rail- 
road, that, within two hours, can carry the wool into a great mar- 
ket, where it is worth twenty-two cents a pound, and where 
mutton can be sold by the carload. If the owners of the big 
shtep ranches of Texas or the wool-growers of Ohio were thor- 
oughly acquainted with the advantages of this region in the pur- 

27 



suit of tb<^ir business, sheep-raising would certainly become a great 
industry along this coast, or, if the class of farming population 
hero were possessed with the vim of the visitors, whom they even 
fail to feed with home-grown products, this part of Mississippi 
might be made the most prosperous portion of the South. It 
seems so easy for the rural population to live here that thej' have, 
apparently, no desire to grow rich or as progressive as the agri- 
cultural populaticm of less-favored sections. 

Bay St. Louis has a bright future before it. It is one of the 
most favorably-located tewns in Mississippi, with a fine region of 
country around about it, a beautiful sheet of water on either side, a 
salubrious site, and one of the most delightful summer and winter 
climates in the world, and, above all, it is inhabited by a popula- 
tion possessing refinement and elegance to a high degree, which 
would be a sufBcient attraction to draw to it much of the refine- 
ment and wealth of other sections and cities. 




• 28 



LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. Ft. 
Pass Christian, Miss., 1886. 

UR party left the charming and beautiful town of Bay St. 
Louis in a northward-bc>und mail train of the Louisville & 

fj Nashville Railrpad. Immediately after the train leaves 
Bay St. Louis depot, it runs across Bay St. Louis on a long 
bridge, built upon concrete caissons and square creosoted timber. 
The wood is creosoted for its preservation, and to protect it from 
the boring of the teredo, a singular worm of the tropic seas, which 
is prone to penetrate every drift-log and ship's bottom floating 
in the waters of the southern parts of the ocean. In a year these 
marine augers perforate any unprotected timber found in salt 
water into a perfect honeycomb form. Timbers treated by the 
creosoting process are unmolested by these pests, and are as dur- 
able as iron. The bridge contains a wide iron draw to permit 
the very considerable navigation of the Bay St. Louis and its 
four affluent rivers and bayous. To the right of the bridge, near 
the east bank of the bay, is the barnacle-covered wreck of a brig, 
a relic of the Mexican war, an old prize of our navy converted 
into a light ship, and lost in a storm. 

One crossing the Bay St. Louis northward is struck with the 
beauty of the headland extending out into the sound to the south- 
ward. It is a bold curving cape, standing out in clear-cut relief 
against the green water below and the blue sky above. It is cov- 
ered with the grand growth of the primeval forest, tall towering 
pines, giant live-oaks, and the glistening foliage and great white 
blooms of the magnolia grandiflora. At the foot of the forest 
and beneath the bluff banks upon which it stands, a broad, glitter- 
ing slope of white sand reaches down to the edge of the green 
water of rippling bay and undulating sound. 

They call this miniature combination of Cape Verde and Point 
au Sable Henderson's Point. And this is the western lii^.it of 
Pass Christian. 

Fifty-seven miles out from the Crescent City, the train stops at 
a large passenger and freight depot, and we debark at one of the 

29 



most famous and fashionable summer and winter watering-places 
on all the Southern seacoast, the very ancient colonial village, and 
the handsome, prosperous modern town of Pass Christian. 

The first natural curiosity that meets the traveler's sight at 
this celebrated place is a class of hackraen, who cherish moderate 
views as to the individual appointment of finances on this earth. 
At some watering-places, the hack-drivers seem to bo dissatisfied 
with anything less than the earth itself. But here one may bo 
whirled smoothly and swiftly in a comfortable vehicle along shell- 
paved avenues two and three miles for twenty-five cents. It is a 
sign that life is easily sustained in a country where money has 
such purchnsing power. It could be hardly otherwise here, where 
the soil may laugh its harvests of luscious fruits and delicious veg- 
etables to " the tickling of the hoe," and the sea gives up its mir- 
aculous Gallilean profusion of fishes. 

Pass Christian, like the town of Bay St. Louis, is located on a 
long peninsula. The length of the town along this peninsula is 
about six miles. The peninsula is formed by the ^Mississippi 
Sound in front, or southward, Bay St. Louis on its western side, 
and Bayous Bois d'Ore and Portage on the north. The beautiful 
name of the Bois d'Ore was given by the French explorers to one 
of these streams because they discovered it in the autumn, when 
the foliage of its bordering forests was richly tinted with red and 
gold. The French title means "gilded woods," or forests. The 
humbler classes of natives long ago rechristened it the " Birdery." 
The corruption is spreading, and Mississippi is liable to lose, be- 
fore long, one of her prettiest geographical French names. The 
Bayou Portage was so called because, eight or ten miles above its 
mouth, it approaches to uithin nearly a mile of the sea, on the 
shore of which the colonists resided. 

Tlie Indians and settlers transported their canoe-loads of furs, 
peltries, and food products they gathered from the interior, beyond 
this bayou, to the ancient villages on the coast, across this narrow 
neck by overland "portage," rather than carry them down the 
bayou, out of the bay, and up the sound, for twenty miles, by wa- 
ter. The farmers living along the banks of the old "Portage" 
already generally call the clear winding stream the " Potash." In 
future years the Americans will say it was named from the number 
of charcoal-burning kilns along its banks. 



This question is dealt upon largely in these articles because it 
certainly is a fact that the name of a region, or of a resort, has 
much to do with its patronage and its popularity. Imagine Sara- 
toga with such an accurate title as " Healthy Water Holes," and 
how much less wealth and fashion would the fancy picture visiting 
that famous place. 

Pass Christian has a good enough name,though it is an anom- 
aly, and neither correct English nor French. It was probably 
called " Passe Chretiennc," because some of those priests, who were 
the courageous pioneers everywhere in America in French explo--^ 
ration and settlements, preached to a gathering of savages at this 
point, converting them to Christianity. 

Some of the authorities say the name was derived f roin the fact 
that a Norwegian navigator first discovered the comparatively deep 
channel that passes near this part of the shore, and that the French 
named the land near it "Passe a Christian." As ten to one the 
JSorseman would have been named Christiansen, that does not ap- 
pear plausible. 

Whatever may be the origin of its name, the fact of its exist- 
ence as a great watering-place is a reality; a town grown from the 
few huts of visiting members of the Cat Island Colony to one of the 
most beautiful and popular watering-places on the Southern coast. 
The land level of the sea front, whereupon the town is located, 
varies in height from three to lifteen feet above that of the sea, 
and that of the northern side of the peninsula is as much as twenty 
or thirty feet above tide-water. 

" The Pass,"' as Southern visitors and residents term it, h;is a 
water frontagi; on the Mississippi Sound of six miles, including its 
villa-ornamented wings of West End and East End. Along this 
entire front is a broad shell-paved avenue, lying under the shade of 
magnificent live-oaks and lofty magnolias. Its groves of oal-s and 
magnolia and its surrounding forests of pine are covered with 
perennial verdure. Their evergreen foliage produces the impres- 
sion that one is in the midst of a region of perpetual summer; and 
this impression is not f;ir wrong, as the climate is so mild that roses 
and violets I'loorn through the short winter, and this is at all times 
a land of flowers. The meteorological statistics show that its aver- 
age range of winter temperature is about sixty degrees Fahrenheit. 
The fro^t-bearing winds of this region blow from the northward. 

31 



The seacoast is sheltered, in that direction, from its Borean breath 
by the great southern pine belt more than a hundred miles wide, 
which follows the coast line of the Gulf States. The prevailing 
winter breezes are from the southward, across the Gulf of Mexico, 
the mighty thermal manufactory that sends its mild sea currents 
over three thousand leagues of ocean to temper the distant winter 
climes of Norway, Britain, France, and Spain. It is under the 
genial influence of the neighboring Gulf waters and the perpetual 
Gulf breezes that blow from the tropic islands, that the forests of 
the Mississippi seacoast are clad in perpetual verdure, and its flow- 
ers kept in constant bloom. 

In the drive along the sea front of Pass Christian, from one 
end of the town to the other, the tourist sees a long succes- 
sion of luxurious residences located in spacious park-like grounds, 
where the shadows of forest-growa oaks, elms, and magnolia 
float over velvety lawns in patches of shade and patincs ot 
sunlight; extensive boarding-houses, witli rustic benches scat- 
tered along the flower-bordered and shrubbery-shaded walks 
about them ; and hundreds of pretty cottages, with hammocks 
swinging lazily abnut in the breeze that visits their broad veran- 
das. In summer it is a scene of perfect lest, langourous, delicious, 
siesta-inviting rest; lulled by the tuneful rhythm of ripples break- 
ing on the sandy beach, and sweetened by the soft Seabreeze that 
comes stealing over the soothed senses, fresh and pregnant, as if it 
were breathed from the amorous mouth of Aphrodite, the sea-born. 
In winter it is a picture of blue skies, green groves, bending and 
waving in the south wind, grassy plats, bright with the presence 
and sweet with the perfume of violets and roses, and mellow sun- 
shine, welcome as the new, life-giving warmth of the Northern 
May. 

The largest hostelry in the town of Pass Christian is the Mexi- 
can Gulf Hotel. Tiiis is a handsome, extensive, and ornate build- 
ing, with a few tasteful outlying cottages around it, situated near 
the beach, in a fine oak-shaded park. The hotel, several stories in 
height, containing elegant, well-furnished rooms, is as fine a house 
of the kind as any on the Gulf or Southern Atlantic coast. The 
building will accommodate about three hund-red guests. This splen- 
did structure was erected with a special view to the entertainment 
of Northern visitors during the winter. During the last season it 

32 



was occupied by several hundred health and pleasure-seekers from 
colder climes, residents from every part of the North, citizens of 
the remote North-western Territories, and the inhabitants of the 
shores of the Maine harbors. Every great city in the North had 
its representatives here from November, 1885, to June, 188G, when 
they left, but to give place to the large throngs of Southern visit- 
ors being entertained or living in its limits. During several 
weeks' sojourn at " the Pass," the writer had the honor of meeting 
many of the pleasant gentlemen and charming ladies who had 
come to seek the benefits and pleasures of the Southern clime. 
With one voice this goodly company were loud in their praises of 
the locality, and many who were experienced Florida tourists ex- 
pressed a great preference over this for the noted Floridian resorts. 
Not the least of the stated attractions of this place and coast was 
its easy acce'=sibility to the large cities of New Orleans and Mobile, 
permitting the full enjoyment of the social, dramatic, operatic, and 
all other urban pleasures, as well as the well-.-ippreciuted delights 
of a rural retreat, or, more properly speaking, of a large suburban 
town. 

The summer population of Pass Christian numbers about four 
thousand. Lust winter a large influx of Northern visitors increased 
considerably the average of the winter population, whieh had been 
for a few preceding years between fifteen hundred and two thou- 
sand. The indications are tnat the number of Northern visitors 
will be largely increased here next season. With all its hotel and 
residence room made available. Pass Christian might afford lodging 
and entertainment to at least fifteen hundred winter visitors. 

A project has been suggested, and seriously considered in New 
Orleans, of erecting a mammoth Southern summer and winter 
hotel on Henderson's Point in the west end of the town. This 
year the State secured a large park at that locality as a permanent 
place of encampment for its enrolled militia. The point now con- 
tains about two square miles of magnificent forest, growing on a 
high and level piece of land sloping downward from the sea and 
bay front to the line of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad in its 
rear. The wood and timber would more than pay for the clear- 
ing of the forest, leaving a suflicient number of groves for shade 
and ornamental purposes. The company who undertakes this 
work will have one of the finest located sites for a watering-place 

33 



hotel in the United States ; with a thousand acres of level park 
land around it, a grand trunk railroad line as its rear boundary, 
and a beautiful sheet of water on either side of its front, Bay St. 
Louis and Mississippi Sound. 

The railroad connections of this resort are one of its greatest 
advantages. It is within reach of New Orleans by a smooth and 
splendid steel railroad in a journey of an hour and a half; in New 
Oi'leans this road receives the passenger travel of the Illinois Cen- 
tral, the Mississippi Valley, the Texas & Pacific, and Morgan's 
Louisiana & Texas, reaching, like its own northward connections, 
from Maine to Minnesota, and from Minnesota to California. 

Among the more modern attractive features of Pass Christian 
are a large number of artesian fountains recently opened in the 
town. The artesian augers strike an illimitable subterranean wa- 
ter supply at a depth of from five hundred to six hundred feet. 
The tubed openings spout up into the air solid streams of wonder- 
fully pure water several inches in diameter, which attain a head of 
forty feet above the surface of the fountains. Such crystal show- 
ers are constantly playing above the lawns of many fine residences 
and boarding-houses here, making the inhabitants utterly indepen- 
dent of rain or drouth, if they ever happen to be subjected to such 
meteorological variations, wliichhave not occurred during the past 
century, at least. 

The numerous fishing and promenade piers, pagoda-ornamented, 
projecting into the sound, along the six-mile frontage of Pass 
Christian, are manifestations mute in themselves, but by no means 
silent in those who use them, of the practice of the favorite water- 
ing-place pastimes of fishing "or moonlight flirting, according to the 
bait used. The fisning is devoted to the capture of the same varie- 
ties of fish as those frequenting the Kigolets, which were fully de- 
scribed in a previous article written from English Lookout. The 
waters in this vicinity are, however, more frequented by Spanish 
mackerel, the famous pompano of Florida, and the shoal-loving 
flounder, whose flat "ray" shape is frequently speared by members 
of pleasure parties, formed of young ladies and gentlemen, who 
deem flounder-spearing a diversion, which it is not considered by 
the skillful wielders of the bending rod and the singing reel. 

The shapely hulls and the slim, polished masts of numerous 
little vessels lying at anchorage off the pier-heads, and the glisten- 
s' 



ing white sails that iioat between the coast and the faint purple line 
of the distant islands, serve to show that boating and yachting are 
among the liberally-patronized amusements of the place. Both the 
summer and winter population are much given to social, Thespian, 
and Terpsichorean pleasures, and the calliope has loosed many a 
Calypso beneath the groves of this sea-swept plain. The residents 
and the visitors have several social, dramatic, and musical organi- 
zations, to cultivate the art of making life seem the shorter for its 
happiness. These have ample halls, salons, club-rooms, and even 
a little theater, with first-class stage and scenic paraphernalia. 
Sailing excursions out to the lighthouses, the islands, and around 
through Bay St. Louis into Wolf river, are the most popular 
amusements indulged in by the young ladies and gentlemen; 
and the pretty girls seem devoted to such aquatic diversions, de- 
spite their attendant drawbacks of blistered hands and sunburned 
faces. 

One of the favorite excursion points visited by sailing parties 
of residents and strangers is a great shell mound on the banks of 
Wolf river, lying in the shadow of a live-oak forest. A few 
months ago a party of shell diggers excavated five prehistoric 
skeletons, from a great depth, in one of these mounds. The writer 
has a skull and several of the larger bones of one of these relics of 
an epoch long departed, which ruins are open to the inspection of 
any learned anatomist, geologist, conchologist, or archaeologist who 
cares to examine them. They are rejected or used by the shell 
diggers; they are not particular as to whether their material be 
lime phosphates or lime carbonates, the stuff is so much per barrel, 
and it all goes. « 

Immediately in front of Pass Christian, in the sound, is one of 
the largest oyster beds in this portion of the Gulf. It varies in 
width from a mile to two miles, and extends from the shore, in one 
direction to the Pass Marian, or Merritt Shoals Light-house, and 
thence in another to the western end of Cat Island, through a 
length of ten miles. This is the great oyster bank which supplies 
the several canning factories of the Mississippi seacoast, and fur- 
nishes a large proportion of its bivalves to the consumers of the 
more distant Crescent City. In the fishing season a fleet of forty 
or fifty sail is busy on the banks collecting these inexhaustible 
stores of sea food. Projects and schemes looking to the further 

35 



development of the oyster and fish canning business hy the estab- 
lishment of factories at this and other points are now being incu- 
bated. The prepared products are altogether shipped northward 
by rail, and sold at good prices in the large interior cities. 

The sea shooting on the nearest Gulf islands is fine during the 
winter months of the, year, ducks, geese, curlew, and snipe being 
found in abundance among and upon them. Quail shooting, about 
the environs of the town, is fair, and would be fine if the wise 
game laws of Mississippi were as rigidly enforced here as they are 
in other portions of the State. Splendid deer and turkey shooting 
is enjoyed by camping parties, v/ho ascend some distance up "Wolf 
river. "Wolf river, the Bois d'Or^, and the Portage are excellent 
fishing streams for the famous Southern green trout, the best and 
gamest fresh-water fish found in this section 

The peninsula strip whereupon Pass Christian is located con- 
tains a superficial area often or twelve square miles, or six thousand 
or seven thousand acres. 

In this district there are one or two extensive grape grow- 
ers and wine producers. Their product is considered a superior 
article by connoisseurs of New Orleans, who profess to be familiar 
with foreign wines. Smaller wine men find it more profitable to 
sell their grapes, as the vineyards are remarkably prolific. The 
small stock growers of this immediate vicinity raise enough good 
beef and mutton to feed the four thousand summer population and 
to keep the wolf some distance away from their own doors as well. 
The possibilities of skilled gardening and scientific farming have 
not been reached here, as the agricultural interest is not generally 
conducted by a highly educated or an ambitious class. With skill, 
judgment, and a little guano applied to the farms, fields, gardens, 
and fruit groves of the contiguous region, the owners of the soil 
might carry on an exceedingly profitable business, shipping early 
fruits and vegetables to the Northern markets, following the ex- 
ample of their prospering fellow-citizens near Mobile. When 
pleasure and health-seekers from Northern climes are thoroughly 
acquainted with its great attractions, Pass Christian will become 
a gay little winter capital. 



36 



LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R. 
Mississippi City, 1886. 

,N the years of our Lord, 1835 or 183G, or little more than half 
a century ago, when the boom of modern railroad building 
had not yet struck the South, and men traveled from the 
"3 interior 'to the sea in wide lumbering family coaches or in 
creaking mule wagons covered with white canvas awnings, a few 
capitalists of Mississippi incubated a great scheme. They were 
correct in the ideas they cherished, but they were ahead of their 
time fifty years; and their children may yet see their great project 
an accomplished fact. 

About the time designated three directors of an organization 
called the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad Company, Dr. Samuel 
Puckett, Mr. Alsbury, and Colin McRea, Esq., a brother of one 
of the Mississippi governors, visited this seacoast, selected the 
present site of Mississippi City as the terminus of their projected 
road, had a large city laid off in lots, and spent $40,000 in laying 
the brick foundations of a hotel of mammoth dimensions, the 
material of whose basement was subsequently removed and used 
for other purposes than that originally contemplated. 

The celebrated Brandon Bank furnished the funds for all these 
expenditures, and was to put up the bonds for building the road. 
Mississippians who have read of Law and the Mississippi scheme, 
or of the South Sea Bubble, are more interested in the era of 
"Shocka Jones" and of the famous Brandon Bank, in which 
there were millions on paper. 

The boost of the enterprising speculators failed to make the 
pine forest along the shore disappear immediately and an immense 
commercial port rise in its place, built by the magic of money ; 
but it brought the spot into notice as a fine sight for a summer 
watering-place, and soon a beautiful village grew where the great 
city was to be. 

Our party, boarding the morning mail train of the Louisville 
& Nashville Eailroad at Pass Christian, after a quick flight of 
thirteen miles, descended at the railroad station of Mississippi 

37 



City, near which the black figures on a white mile-post inform one 
that it is planted seventy miles from Mobile and seventy-one from 
New Orleans, From the railroad depot a ride of about one-third 
of a mile brings one out to the sea front under the shady parks of 
Gulf View — a name ergoyed by one of the sections of the four- 
mile frontage of ' Mississippi City. The name is appropriate. 
There is a broad, unbroken, and blue stretch of the gulf lying off 
to the south-eastward, and to the southward the long line of Cat 
Island, with the land lying "hull down" below the ten miles of 
intervening water, the dim tracery of its pine forest seeming like 
a distant bank of blue smoke resting upon the waves, and its great 
white sand dune, like a snowy peak, looming above the trees. 

The island seems so old, so full of the dreamy sleep of another 
epoch in history, slumbering upon the couch of the far-away blue 
waves, and canopied by its Indian summery curtain of dim purple 
mist, that one instinctively reaches for a marine glass to look for 
the great white banner of the Bourbons, like a tiny speck, floating 
above the crest of the sand dune, and the faint outline of the masts 
and spars of Iberville's fleet rising from the surface of the deep 
ofRng to the eastward. The sand dune rises like a monument to 
mark the neighboring site of the first European colony planted on 
or near the Mississippi seacoast. Ship Island, where Iberville's 
expedition first landed, is to the south-east of Mississippi City. 
Between Ship Island and Cat Island there is a deep and wide 
channel or pass entering the Mississippi Sound from the Gulf. 
Between the islands and the mainland that channel is shown by 
careful examination of the minute maps of the United States 
Coast Survey to lead to two deep harbors, or anchorages, One of 
these, aflxirding from eighteen to twenty-two feet of water, is 
about half way between the town of Pass Christian and Cat Island. 
This is now used by the largest class of sea-going lumber vessels, 
who there receive their loads from the lumber depots of the coast 
by ligliters. The other harbor is more remote from tlie shore of 
the mainland in the immediate rear of Ship Island. Both these 
deep "roads" or anchorages is safely sheltered from the storms 
and waves of the Gulf by the protection of the islands under 
whose lee they are placed. 

To reach these pine harbors by railroad communication with 
the interior is an object that has ardently been desired during the 

28 



last fifty years by enterprising Mississippians and capitalists frorri 
otlier States of our country. The State Legislature has chartered 
two or three railroad companies who have undertaken to accom- 
plish this great work. The old companies were hampered by 
more litigation than was provoked by the celebrated case of 
" Jarndyce against Jarndyce," the last legal tilt having been be- 
tween the Vicksburg & Ship Island and the Louisville, New Or- 
leans & Texas Kailroad Company. The present Gulf & Ship 
Island Kailroad Company can, apparently, read its title clear to a 
good terminus at each end of their projected line, and a secured 
right-of-way to the sea and Ship Island, and the railroad will be 
completed when the bonds are all satisfactorily located. When 
the road is finished, Mississippi may have upon her coast a new 
Pensacola, destined to grow into the prominence held at present 
by the busy and growing Floridian city. 

The increase of the lumber business of the coast would alone 
serve to pay the cost of running a railroad from the center of the 
State through its wide pine belt to a deep harbor near its seacoast, 
and, in this source, for the first few years of its existence, would, 
apparently, be found tbe chief profits of the line. 

Mississippi City is now the capital or county-seat of Harrison 
county. It contains a resident population of from ten hundred to 
twelve hundred, and a summer population of probably eighteen 
hundred or two thousand. Like Bay St. Louis and Pass Christi in, 
it is located on a narrow strip of land, with a navigable stream in 
its rear and the sound before it. The Bayou Bernard is behind 
or north of it. This bayou was not called after Bernard de la 
Harpe, but after a free colored patriarch, whose flocks and herds 
roamed along its banks. Handsboro, a lively lumber manufactur- 
ing town, a mile and a half distant, is one of the rear suburbs of 
Mississippi City. This contains four extensive saw-mills, a num- 
ber of stores and residences, and a population of about seven 
hundred. 

There are some fine hotels near the sea-front of Mississippi 
Citj'. The principal of these are the Gulf View and the Tegarden. 
The Gulf View contains long wings of extensive and handsome 
two-story buildings flanking elegant dance and dining halls in 
their center. It is in the midst of a park or plateau elevated fif- 
teen feet above the sea level, and several acres in extent, shaded 

89 



by groves of live-oak, magnolia, and umbrageous china trees. 
For several miles along the sea-front the undulating shore is lined 
by pretty cottages and handsome villas uf the residents or citizens of 
New Orleans, many of whom own summer homes in this locality. 

The winter and summer climates of this point are moderated 
and tempered by the causes already fully described in preceding 
articles of this series. The protection of Northern pine forests 
and the proximity of the warm Gulf waters prevent the mercury 
from hunting the bulb in winter, and keep it generally hovering 
between fifty-five and seventy-five degrees Fahn nheit. The aver- 
age of the winter-temperature record, kept for a large number of 
years, is sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit, and the summer heat 
eighty-three degrees. The town is near the isothermal line of sev- 
enty degrees, and the latitude is thirty degrees and twenty minutes. 
It is cooled by constant eddies of the north-east trade-wind during 
the late summer. The hotels and most houses of public entertain- 
ment were originally built entirely with a view to rendering them 
attractive to Southern summer visitors. Some of these mansions 
have been altered and remodeled with the idea of preparing them 
for Northern winter residents. In its present shape, that town 
can probably entertain between seven hundred and eight hundred 
Northern visitors. It has already had its pioneers who have 
swung off westward from the southward-bound flock in their an- 
nual Floridian flight. The strangers who have wintered here 
during the past two seasons pronounce the locality charniing, its 
railroad advantages of quick connection with Mobile and the South- 
ern metropolis of business, pleasure, and fashion — New Orleans — 
highly desirable, and its climate surpassingly delightful. Proper 
efibrts are being already made to develop the winter-entertaining 
facilities of the resort up to a state of perfection. 

One of the pleasantest diversions of the fall and winter to be 
found at Mississippi City lies in rambling, riding, or driving 
among the paths and along the roadways of its rich outlying 
forests, or over the waving hills, rolling away toward the Bayou 
Bernard. The wielders of the glittering squirrel lifle and of the 
light split bamboo rod may find plenty of exercise for their art 
among the nut-bearing groves of th(3 woods, or along the numerous 
green trout streams that wind at tlie foot of its pines and oaks, 
or among its tangled copses and thickets. 

40 



Out beyond the Bayou Bernard lie the pastures of the sheep- 
herders, and, still further northward, the great Southern lumber 
region, -where the logmen's camps have replaced the red men's wig- 
wams and villages, and where the wild game of hummock and 
plain still remains in its condition of colonial abundance. 

Down the coast, near the center of the sea-front of the town, 
may be seen the extensive buildings and wharves of the Gulf Coast 
Canning Factory Company, where thousands of barrels of oysters 
and bushels of shrimps are annually hermetically sealed and sold 
to Northern markets. 

There are several large vineyards within the limits of the 
town, where a considerable quantity of native wine is manufact- 
ured. One of the largest of these, the " Gulf View Vineyard," 
contains thirteen acres of prolific varieties of vine. The fruit- 
growing capacity of the region is unlimited. Oranges, olives, figs, 
peaches, peurs, melons, etc., mixed products of the tropic and tem- 
perate zones, tell of its genial skies and generous soil. Less than 
one-half of its gardening, farming, fruit-growing, and stock-raising 
area is utilized, the chief part of the land being cumbered with the 
second-growth pine thickets, so easy to clear and so useless where 
they are. The agricultural p ipulation, comparatively small, al- 
ready has as much land as it can tend. Here thousands of acres 
of land can be purchased for nominal prices, cleared at an actual 
profit to the purchasers by selling the wood, and converted to 
some of the most valuable fields, farms, and pastures in the South. 
If these thickets and forests were cleared out to the banks of the 
streams in its rear, the seacoast country from Pearl river to Pasca- 
goula would become a continuous city along the shore, populated 
in summer or winter by representatives of every State in the 
Union. 

Considerable wool shipments from the country beyond the 
Bayou Bernard, with its immense, yet poorly-developed, sheep 
ranges, are made at the stations of the Louisville & Nashville 
Eailroad. 

Mississippi City has, for many years, been justly famous for 
the fine mackerel fishing to bo had in the waters of the sound be- 
fore it. The Spanish mackerel of the Mexican Gulf is a much 
finer and gamer fish than bis cousin of the colder Northern seas, 
and is one of the most delicately-flavored of all the piscine species 

41 



•jquenting the waters of the American coast. Ichthyological 
science can not do his personal appearance justice in its descriptive 
classification. He is rare and radiant, flapping and flashing like 
hurnished silver in his high sportive leaps above the waves into 
the air, struggling with swiftly-fading glories as he is relieved 
from the cruel conquering barb of steel, or steaming and fragrant 
as he comes to the table fresh from the coals of some wonderful 
Creole artist iu the culinary line. 

We will introduce the Spanish mackerel to the reader in one 
of the fish's favorite feeding grounds. 

There is a long wharf reaching from the shore of Gulf View 
out four thousand feet into the channel of the sound. This ex- 
tended pier is dotted at various intervals by bath-houses, located 
at difl'ereut depths for infantile, timid adult, or natatorially-accom- 
plished bathers. At the end of the pier is a wide platform, built 
on stout piles, which was once the landing-place for the regular 
fleet of sound steamers, a fleet that went out of commission when 
the steel line reduced the time between this point and New 
Orleans from ten to two hours, and made it accessible by several 
daily trains. The broad platform at the end of the pier is the 
mackerel fisher's paradise. 

After dinner, our party, by special invitation, accompanied 
four young amateurs from the Crescent City, well-known wielders 
of the rod and reel — Messrs. H — , M — ■, P— , and E— . A sun- 
browned, bare-footed citizen, looking solemn and mournful enough 
to have driven a hearse in front of it, brought up the rear of this 
procession with a basket of mullet for bait upon his arm. When 
they arrived at the pierhead, the members of the party unlimbered 
their tackle for action. The mullet were deftly sliced into shin- 
ing imitations of smaller fish, the hooks were baited, and the mack- 
erel fishers began their swishing play of the alluring morsels along 
the water. Soon each had a glittering, flapping mackerel on the 
planks of the platform, and, later, a score of the shining beauties 
lay strewn around, fading in the sunlight. The monotony of 
mackerel fishing was relieved by the occasional capture of a sea- 
trout, flounder, sheephead, or redfish. Finally, Mr. H — struck a 
big fish, or rather a big fish struck Mr. H — There was a man on 
the wharf, posed in the statue-cast of a wrestling Koman gladiator, 
with the contorted muscles and sinews standing in bold relief on 

42 



his biceps and breast, and the beiids of sweat rolling down his anx- 
iously-furrowed brow. There was a rod in his hands bent to the 
tension of a bow ready to drive its barbed shaft feather deep into 
the neck of some hydra or centaur. There was a line, tautened to 
rigid tension, reaching seaward. There was a reel singing and 
screaming like the whistle of a recently-awaken'ed policeman to 
tell the world of a well-guarded beat. Tlicre was a whirlpool of 
wraith and foam a hundred feet away in the sea, from whose boil- 
ing vortex a huge marine monster, white and dazzling, and with 
savagely-shaking head, suddenly leaped, and then line, rod, and 
angler all simultaneously flew back unstrung, and the submarine 
steam navigator steered his powerful vessel onward, witli a steel 
fishhook in his bow and a few fathoms of line in his wake. 

" Holy Moses I what a silverfish ! '' gasped the baffled Mr. H — , 
who immediately lowered his voice to the tone of a confidential 
conversation with Beelzebub as to his future frying of all silver- 
fish, and of this one in particular. 

The party wound up its day's sport with a string of sixty-three 
mackerel and several other uncounted varieties of sea fish, and no 
silverfish. 

Mississippi City is certain to be developed, at an early day, in- 
to a great lumber-shipping port. Its present attractions of a fer- 
tile soil surrounding it, a fine summer and winter climate existing 
here, the wonderful healthiness of its site, and its splendid bath- 
ing, hunting, and fishing facilities are enough to stimulate its 
steady growth into the favor of thousands who annually, for health 
or pleasure, seek the benefits of the glorious Southern climate and 
the diversions aflTorded by a breezy Southern sea. 

This resort is now frequented by many Southern planters, with 
their families, and by summer residents from the leading Southern 
cities. Its hotel and boarding-house keepers are in communication, 
at present, with Northern centers of population with reference to 
the subject of the number of Northern tourists they can entertain 
and the quality artd cost of the attractions and the living to be 
provided. 



43 



LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R. 

BiLOXi, Miss., 1886. 

RIDE of ten minutes or nine miles eastward, in a lightning 
express train of the Louisville & Nashville llailroad, brought 
our party from Mississippi City to the ancient and thriving 
town of Biloxi, the next in the chain of prominent South- 
ern watering-places along this route. 

From the railroad depot at Biloxi a self-sacrificing and philan- 
thropic young hack-driver conducted us in his vehicle to the Mon- 
trose Hotel, located on the sea front of the town. 

After a refreshing dip in tlie tossing salt sea near the mouth of 
Biloxi Bay, the wielders of crayon, or camera, and of pen, sought 
out some of the most prominent points of the place, reviewed 
some of the quaint old colonial records for its history, and inter- 
viewed a few of the leading citizens on the subject of its modern 
resources, attractions, and patronage as a pleasure resort. 

Before commencing this descriptive article the writer takes 
occasion to acknowledge the obligations under which he was 
placed by the kindness of Major W. T. "Walthall, a gentleman of 
rare attainments, and an author richly stored with the chronicler's 
lore; to an enterprising host, Mr. P. J. Montrose, and to Mr. 
Elmer, Representative in the Mississippi Legislature from Harri- 
son county. The modern town of Biloxi, like nearly all the noted 
resorts and towns of the Mississippi seacoast, is situated on a 
peninsula. That on which this town is placed is from one to two 
miles in width, and about six in length, lying almost due east and 
west. The southern side or point of this peninsula is washed by 
the waves of the Gulf of Mexico, or, the sound, breaking on a 
sloping sandy beach. Its eastern end on which the town is 
chiefly located projects into Biloxi Bay, while its northern shores 
are bounded by the Back Bay of B;loxi, as it is named on the 
maps, and by the narrow and deep stream. Bayou Bernard. 

The site of the present town covers an area of about two thou- 
sand five hundred acres on the eastern extremity of this elevated 
tongue of land, and extends in a long wing along the seacoast, 

44 



. I^^TT- 



several miles to the westward. Its resident population is esti- 
mated at two thousand five hundred ; and this, duriiiL^ the summer, 
is increased by the influx of summer residents and visitors Irom the 
Southern cities and States to about four thousand. The town is 
finely and regularly laid off by wide and shady streets and ave- 
nues, lying under and lined by the indigenous and omnipresent 
live-oak and the more-recently planted umbrella china. It has 
ten miles of shell-paved drives along the sea and bay frontage, 
wiiich are bordered by the principal hotels and the beautiful sum- 
mer villas of the place. In the inner harbor, Immediately off the 
ends of its piers and wharves, a fleet of small vessels, fishing 
smacks, lumber schooners, pleasure boats, and yachts lie at anchor- 
age, diminished by departures or increased by accessions, according 
to the will or needs of those chiefly interested in this interior 
marine of the sound. Ten miles away 1o the southward the sticks 
and spars of three-masted schooners or square-rigged vessels show 
the location of the deep " roads " in rear of Ship Island, while the 
tops of a long fringe of scrubby pines indicate the location of the 
Ship Island sands. 

It seems bard to realize the fact that this was once practically 
the capital of Louisiana, and that New Orleans was one of its 
dependent colonies. Biloxi was the first colony planted by the 
French in the south part of their great Louisiana possessions. It 
was settled in 1699 by Iberville; but this was not the Biloxi of 
these days (and this question will confuse the future chroniclers). 
The original colony was east of the bay, and was removed to this 
point about the year 1719. 

It was chosen as the site of their seat of colonial government 
by a council of the French captains and commanders. Bienville, 
the wisest and most far-seeing of all these leaders, wished to 
remove the seat of government to the new colony at Orleans. 
Hubert earnestly advocated the elevated blufF-land plateau of 
Natchez, where Mississippi's second largest city now stands, and 
he predicted that that spot would become the commercial center of 
the Mississippi Valley. 

The colony was, nevertheless, removed to this point, and 
Hubert sailed away to France to induce the home government to 
make Natchez the capital of their great possessions in the Missis- 
sippi Yalley. He was prevented from returning by death. 

45 



m,m 



The Louisiana historian, Martin, says that one of Crozat's ships, 
with three hundred settlers Irom France, arrived two years later. 
Among these were eighty girls from the " Saltpetriere," a noted 
house of correction in Paris. About this time a vessel arrived 
from Guinea with a cargo of Africans, to be employed in cultivat- 
ing the soil. 

This, while it shows an apparent broad construction in the 
charter with reference to the trade in pearls and wool, proves that 
Biloxi must have been quite an important village one hundred 
and sixty-three years ago. 

"When the French moved over to this side of the bay they 
built Fort Louis, omitting the holy prefix of the title. This was 
probably a palisaded structure, like the forts of the American pio- 
neers on the dark and bloody soil of Kentucky and the old North- 
west Territory beyond tlie Ohio, as no monumental mound remains 
to mark the site of the ramparts, though a wide willow-bordered 
ditch is pointed out by some of the inhabitants as probably being 
the moat at tlie foot of the palisades or of the former breast- works. 
The fort at Old Biloxi, to which reference will be made in a subse- 
quent article, was, according to the colonial records, at all events, 
built of heavy timbers. 

During the first century of its existence New Biloxi fell under 
the dominion of four governments — French, British, Spanish, and 
American. It Avas temporarily in the civil war a part of Confed- 
erate States' territory, defended for a short time by a sham battery 
of frowning wooden guns. But it fell a prey to the marines of the 
Federal fleets early in the strife. To-day it is a thriving cosmop- 
olis, with the imprint of Saxon, Frank, Visigoth, and Latin upon 
its population, and the best elements of all predominating. 

It possesses to the highest degree all the advantages of climate 
and the attractions characteristic of the Mississippi seacoast, and is 
justly one of the most celebrated resorts or watering-places in all 
this highly-favored region. In summer it enjoys great popularity 
as an objective point for the long excursion trains that are con- 
stantly leaving the Crescent City, while a large part of its resident 
population at this season is drawn from the winter workers of the 
Southern metropolis. 

The town has several fine hostelries, the chief among which are 
the Montrose, the Bossel, and the Fairview, besides many board- 

^6 



ing-houses and cottages, where the traveling and visiting public 
are well entertained. Most of these places, or houses, were orig- 
inally constructed to meet the demands of summer visitors to a 
seaside resort. But recently they have been altered, to render 
them perfectly comfortable for the Northern visitors, who are com- 
mencing to show a disposition to seek the Mississippi seacoast for 
a winter home more than any other portion of the South. During 
the past winter as many as sixteen hundred Northern tourists and 
travelers visited Biloxi, many of them remaining for months, 
charmed, as they said, with the cheap living, convenient railroad 
travel, and balmy atmosphere of this coast. 

The proprietor of one of Biloxi's leading hotels professes the 
opinion that if a capitalist or a company would erect a hotel in the 
town capable of accommodating as many as a thousand winter 
guests at a time, they could keep it full of Northern tourists, and 
do an extremely profitable business, devoting their efforts exclu- 
sively to providing for this class, a-:id closing their doors to sum- 
mer patronage entirely; and that practically every additional large 
hotel built on the coast would benefit others existing, by bringing 
the region into greater prominence as a winter resort. On this 
theory, which appears not only plausible but strictly correct, the 
mammoth Floridian winter hotels were not the effect of the annual 
Northern migration in that direction, but they were the cause of 
it. They were built to attract winter tourists or residents and to 
increase the visiting throngs, rather than provide for those Avho 
had already fallen into the habit of coming. This is a fact which 
seems to be well worthy the consideration of capitalists. 

The Northern visitors who stopped or dwelt at Biloxi last win- 
ter were chiefly from the extreme Northern and North-western 
States, whose southward journey to this point is much shorter 
than that to San Augustine, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, or other 
resorts of Florida. 

The mere fact of Biloxi's suburban relationship to New Orleans 
forms one of its chief attractions to such visitors, and in this all 
the seacoast resorts of Mississippi possess a great advantage. 

One of the most remunerative industries of the town is con- 
ducted in the four extensive fish, fruit, and oyster canning estab- 
lishments recently located here. The oyster canneries keep in 
occupation, for a greater part of the year, a fleet of at least a hun- 

17 



dred small vessels, luggers, sloops, and schooners. "When the 
oysters areout of season, the factory operatives turn their attention 
to prawn or sea shrimp, or to putting up the iine fruits and vege- 
tables indigenous to the region. Though this is but comparatively 
a new industry, it has already grown to important proportions, 
and supports a large class of the seacoast population. Biloxi Cay, 
from its mouth opposite Deer Island, extends, with a rounding 
westward curve, nearly ten miles inland. It receives the waters 
of Biloxi river and Bayou Bernard, near its head, and those of 
Fort Bayou, close to its mouth. The bay and all the streams 
namtd are famous for their fishing, and abound iii immense num- 
bers of green trout or bass, speckled sea-trout, rcdfish, and sheep- 
head. The waters of. the sound channels, near the end of its 
piers and wharves, are frequented by the same varieties of fish, 
with the exception of the green trout, which is a fresh water or 
brackish water fish, and at times by the superior Spanish mack- 
erel, and the finest of all American fish, the pompano. Out in 
the sound, a few miles away, both amateur anglers and profes- 
sional fishermen capture quantities of redsnapper and grouper, 
two of the best varieties of fish common to the Gulf of Mexico. 
The blue fish, another choice and gamy denizen of the deep, is 
found in numbers in this part of the Gulf. 

Biloxi enjoys the reputation of being located in the vicinity of 
one of the finest hunting regions in the South. The best deer 
hunting in Mississippi is to be had in the wooded country just 
behind the northern banks of Biloxi river, about ten miles distant 
from the town. The winter duck and snipe shooting is good in 
the bay, the streams leading to it, or in some of the flats near its 
banks. The wild turkey, the noblest game bird of America, still 
remains in undepleted flocks in the thinly-settled hunting region 
beyond the northern shores of Biloxi Bay. 

The natural game preserve has not been decimated by the con- 
stant poachings of pot-hunting mankind, because it is so much 
easier for them to procure their food from the waters immediately 
at hand. The pot-hunters' and the professionals' objects are meat 
and money. It is much easier for them to lift their food out of 
the sea over the edge of a pier or the side of a vessel than to tramp 
a few miles into the interior, loaded with rifle or shot-gun, and to 
lug their games back to their homes or a market. 

48 



The charms of camp life in the invigorating clime of the pine 
lands and oak forests, the beating race of silky-brushed setters, the 
statuesque pose of the thoroughbred pointer, the whirr ot spring- 
ing bevies, or the sweet melody of a winding horn, echoing in the 
woodlands and calling up the responsive music of the deer-hounds' 
deep baying, are all reserved for the amateur sportsman, who can 
appreciate these things, as they are to be found in the former 
famous hunting-grounds of the red man beyond Biloxi Bay, where 
the lumberman's ax and the hunter's rifle in cheering tones tell 
the stranger the great American forests are not yet all felled and 
American game not all gone to the rocky ranges of the Western 
Sierras, or, like the aboriginal legends, beyond the setting sun to 
the spirit hunting-grounds of long-departed tribes of hunters and 




49 



LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R. 

Ocean Springs, Miss., 1886. 

11^4 FTEE a short but exceedingly pleasant stay at Biloxi, made 
pleasanter by the hospitality of its inhabitants, and more 
interesting by the quaint old records of colonial writers, 
kindly furnished by Major Walthall, our party again boarded 
a northward-bound train ot the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, and 
after a ride of four miles, or of about ten minutes' dm'atlou, stepped 
out on the platform of the Ocean Springs depot. 

Part of the journey, although made by rail, is over water, on 
a long structure of creosoted timber, concrete, stone, and iron, 
which spans the mouth of Biloxi Bay. Toward the eastv/ard, 
holding the rich emerald gem of Deer Island in their curving 
clasp, and framing it in a setting of glittering silver, two wide 
channels form the divided entrance from the placid bay to the 
shining sea beyond. 

And this is the famous old Bay of Biloxi, sleeping in the morn- 
ing sun, heedless of the two hundred years that have gone by since 
the rapt eye of the Caucasian rested on its virgin beauty; reckless 
of the two hundred decades that have departed since the last Toltec 
trod upon its shores; waked not to the memory of song, story, or 
legend of the dead warriors that once peopled its banks, or the bar- 
baric women that tuned their love songs to the low rhythm of its 
waves, or mingled their wild death-wail for the battle-slain with 
the hoarse moan of its tempests. 

What a scene to inspire the artist's soul, or to send the fancy 
reveling in the remotest realms of legendary lore ! To the north- 
ward and westward, with bold parabola curve, like a bend of our 
own mighty river, sweeps this shining sheet of blue water. The 
forests of its far northern shores fade away into the magic mists of 
the summer morning, until it is hard to tell whether they are hang- 
ing as a tassoled fringe from the purple curtain of the summer sky, 
or floating as dim islands of verdure on the unruffled breast of a 
summer sea. To the southward and westward, with a gleam of 
glass through the foliage of live-oaks and clustering roofs lying 

50 



under their swaying shadows, and with a heavy haze of Indian 
summer hanging over it, softening the angular lines of its archi- 
tecture, and toning down the rounded or rugged outlines of its 
trees, rests the town of Biloxi, whence we have just departed. To 
the eastward, with bolder banks and more marked undulations of 
the land beyond them, lies the historic site of the first Caucasian 
colony ever planted on the Mississippi seacoast, the germ of States 
and the nucleus of an empire. 

Ponce de Leon's quest, long and arduous, after those fabled 
fountainaof youth, and health, and eternal life, that sprung dragon- 
guarded from the gloomy depths of the New World's forests; 
HernandodeSoto's weary and warring march westward, westward, 
ever westward, looking for the traditional golden mountains that 
still lay a thousand miles beyond his journey's end when his worn 
comrades buried the body of their chieftain beneath the breast of 
the great river, are more full of thrilling narrative, ringing with 
tho clash of resounding arms, dramatic with the tragedic slaughter 
of tribes and nations, but they are utterly insignificant in their 
eflects and fruits when compared to the planting of this little 
French colony on the eastern banks of Biloxi Bay by Lemoyne 
d'Ibervilleand his brother knights and chevaliers of France. 

Here one can imagine the royal banner of the Bourbons rising, 
as the sun above its cloud banks, over the smoke of the morning 
gun near the base of its staff. From here one can think of that 
banner carried and planted on the crescent-shaped banks of the 
Mississippi river, to float over a young city and a great imperial 
domain ten times the area of its mother country. From here one 
has been told of the exploration and colonization of the Lafourche, 
the Eed, the Ouachita, the Tensas, and the crowning of the great 
bluff plateau of Natchez with the French fortress that French 
chivalry named Rosalie, after the beautiful Comptesse de Pont- 
chartrain. 

Here, in the brains of Iberville and his brother Bienville, was 
born that great scheme of making a track for the commerce of the 
new empire upward through the Mississippi, the Illinois, the Great 
Lakes, and the St. Lawrence to the sea; a scheme which General 
Washington so dreaded that he frequently mentioned it, and offi- 
cially proposed to counteract it by connecting the Ohio with the 
Potomac, and the Kanawha with the James, to divert this trade to 

51 



our own Atlantic seaboard ; and a scheme to-day whoso fulfillment 
is hoped for by the projectors and official supporters of the new 
Hennepin canal. 

The old Biloxi colony is full of interest to the Americans of the 
present day. In time it will be regarded as of far more impor- 
tance and more famous than " Massachusetts Bay," where the pil- 
grim fathers landed, with the Bible in one hand and the blunder- 
buss in the other, converting the natives to Christianity or killing 
them, according to the disposition deemed more convenient in the 
case. It will become more noted than the James river settlement, 
where J ohn Smith, thesea rover, and John Rolfe, the mate of the royal 
maid Pocahontas, gave a tint of carnage and romance to the region. 

The Americans know more about the Northern colonies because 
their annals are written in the English that they read. The chron- 
iclers of Louisiana's settlement wrote their records in French. 
Yet these abound in gallant exploits, instances of devoted heroism, 
incidents of sublime self-sacrifice, romantic attachments, and the 
most thrilling episodes of carnage and siege, and cases of knightly 
courtesy among the chevaliers, recalling the chivalry of the Cru- 
sades. The journalist has no time to wander in such glorious fields. 
They fall within the historian's province; and by him they should 
be cleared and laid open to the world. 

Iberville landed at old Biloxi, our modern "Ocean Springs," 
late in the winter of 1699. He found this, as it is to-day, a narrow 
and-elevated peninsula bounded on the south by the sound and the 
eastern strait separating it from Deer Island, on the west by Biloxi 
Bay, and on the north by the Fort Bayou of the present day. The 
surface of the peninsula is undulating and about thirty feet above 
tide water in its highest part. Its sea front is also more undulating 
than other portions of the coast. The peninsula was originally 
clad with a forest of cedar, pine, magnolia, and live-oak, some of 
which is still remaining. After Iberville had planted his colony 
he returned to France, leaving his younger brother Bienville in 
charge, and Sauvolle de la Vilautray in command of the stockade 
fort, which had been built near the point made by the confluence 
of Fort Bayou with Biloxi Bay. Bienville was frequently absent 
from the colony on explorations in Louisiana and Mississippi, when 
Sauvolle, commandant of the fort, was left as the chief director of 
its afiairs. 

52 



The French settlement was called Biloxi, after the tribe, or 
rather tribal branch, of Indians found on the peninsula. Their 
name, according to the ancient chroniclers, signified " Broken 
Jar." The " El Dorado fountain," a large spring back of Bay St. 
Louis,and twospringsat old Biloxi, were celebrated resorts, visited 
by the red men bef jre and during the early colonial days. They 
were sought by the Natchez and Baya Goulas, living on the banks 
of the Mississippi river; by the Chickasaws, dwelling on the more 
distant borders of the Tennessee; by the Choctaws and the Aliba- 
mons, with their probable tribal families of Biloxis and Maublias 
on the seacoast. 

The colony was visited by famine and pestilence two years after 
its founding; the gallant Sauvolle de la Vilautray, commander of 
the fortress, perished at his post, and the garrison and the settlers 
were ordered for a time to Dauphin Island and Mobile, which was 
then another French St. Louis. They subsequently returned and 
remained at old Biloxi for nearly twenty years, whence they re- 
moved, after the deliberations of the Council, which have already 
been described in the article preceding this, to Fort Louis or new 
Biloxi, where one certainly, and probably many more French res- 
idents had already settled. 

With the removal of the colony to the western shores of Biloxi 
Bay, the old settlement of Biloxi passes into oblivion for a great 
many years, as far as is found by a cursory examination of the 
chronicles of De la Harpe, Father Anasthase, DuPratz, Dumont, 
and Charlevoix, and the more modern records of Xavier Martin 
and Colonel Claiborne. 

The old colonial village now appears on the maps under the 
American title of Ocean Springs, a name it is said to have received 
from a New Orleans physician, who, like a majority of those who 
have tested them, had great faith in the valuable medical waters of 
the natural springs found on the peninsula. 

Ocean Springs is by no means a bad name ; but when one thinks 
of the heroism of the gallant French knight, whose post was in 
the midst of war, famine, and pestilence until death relieved him 
from a soldier's duty, one is apt to feel it is a pity that the place 
was not called " Vilautray," as an honor to France and one of her 
chivalricsons. The place is not on the ocean, and the fine mineral 
springs are near the banks of Fort Bayou, and not on the seashore. 

63 



Out in the sound, in front of Ocean Springs, green with verd- 
ure, rests Deer Island. One of the old chroniclers states the fact 
that ancient excavation into the sand drifts of this island exhumed 
relics which showed that it was resorted to, or inhabited, at one 
time by a race of anthropophagi. There were human bones 
strewn around the charred remnants of fire heaps, betokening the 
holding of cannibal festivals. 

Ocean Springs is now a beautiful village, or town, containing a 
resident population of nine hundred or one thousand souls, and a 
total of summer inhabitants numbering about sixteen hundred. 
The town is on one of the most elevated sites along the Mississippi 
seacoast. It has a gulf frontage of almost three miles, and rests 
upon the Louisville & Nashville Eailroad line, about half a mile 
from the sea, in its rear. It contains three hotels — the Ocean 
Springs, on the sea front; the Vancleave, near the Louisville & 
Nashville Kailroad track, and the lUing House. Here, as at the 
other seacoast resorts, can be found many beautiful villas, used as 
summer residences by citizens of New Orleans, or elegant homes 
occupied by the more opulent inhabitants of the place. The uni- 
versal groves of live-oak, magnolia, pine, and cedar are seen every- 
where about the town, shading the yards of its houses or its streets 
and avenues. 

Between the town of Ocean Springs and the southern bank of 
Fort Bayou are the two principal springs, which give its name to 
the resort and were sought by hundreds of miles of travel through 
the pathless forest by thehealth-hunting aborigines. These mineral 
springs are said to be impregnated with chalybeate properties, or 
contain a noticeable proportion of sulphuretted hydrogen. Scien- 
tific analysis has shown them to be among the most valuable of 
American mineral waters. The springs, protected by cool sheds 
and overflowing from artificial stone basins, ai-o largely drawn 
upon by the visiting and resident population. They are generally 
flanked by a row of demijohns more substantial-looking than the 
ghosts of the departed spirits which they may have been. The in- 
habitants, like the scriptural woman at the well with the earthen 
pitcher, come some distance from their homes to the springs to get 
these supplies of health-giving drinking water. Ocean Springs 
entertained last year quite a number of Northern visitors, who 
were equally as well pleased with this resort as were similar visit- 

54 



ors with all other of the watering-places on the Mississippi sea- 
coast, which they freqaonled during the past winter and spring. 
Minnesota, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio were the States most 
numerously represented at the springs, for the reason, expressed 
before, That the people of those States found their shortest route 
to the Southern sea terminating on this coast. 

Theeummer bathing and boating, and the winter shooting and 
fishing are diversions enjoyed here with as much facility as at 
most of the watering-places which have been described. The 
mackerel and pompano fisheries of the sound, the redsnapper and 
grouper banks among the islands, and the famous hunting region 
nortbof the Bay of Biloxi, are all conveniently accessible to this 
point. 

All who try its delights will be amply satisfied, whether they 
comedown from the Northern snow-fields, seeking the balmy air 
of a genial winter clime, or whether they come down from the 
dust and heat of Southern towns and cities, to disport themselves 
in the cool waves or to breathe the soft salt-scented breezes con- 
stantly blowing shoreward from the Mexican Gulf. 




65 



LdUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R. 

Pascagoula. 1886. 

5^4 S one passes beyond Ocean Springs, and on the steel track of 
''\ tli(3 Louisville & Nasliville Euilroad traverses the country 
lying between the historic bays of Biloxi and Pascagoula, the 
first impression produced is, what a splendid country for 
railroad-building this is I "With level beds and the long tangei.ts 
which so delight the surveyor's, the weary rodman's, and the 
watchful locomotive engineer's heart, here the maximum posjibi.i- 
ties of railroad speed are attainable ; and with wide throttle, spoke- 
less wheel, and a trail of smoke streaming behind straight as the 
tail of Tarn O'Shanter's fleeing mare, a fifty or sixty-ton engine 
can get up and get along like the phantom fl ght of the Flying 
Dutchman, or in a way to resurrect the slumbering spirit of 
George Stephenson. 

The railroad officials, however, do not care about attaining the 
possibilities. They are satisfied to drive the iron horse along at a 
comfortable jog-trot of some forty miles an hour, so that the pas- 
sengers may get a fleeting view of this very beautiful stretch 
of country through which their route passes. It is a broad, 
grass-clad piece of tableland. The pine forests and dwarf-pine 
growth are, fortunately, rapidly disappearing. There are miles 
and miles of clearings, whose green swards delight and rest the 
eye. 

In surveying these magnificent parks and verdant pastures, 
one can not help indulging in dreams of the imagination as to 
what a region this Mississippi seacoast might bo made if the thick- 
ets and scrub pine forests were felled, from the shining belt of 
white sands that fringes the shore with a lace-like frill of foamy 
ripples and wavelets, to the margins of the winding rivers, which 
course like silver bands between the rising plateaus of the interior 
and the sea-swept plains of the gulf frontage. 

One of the artistic effects of this clearing process will be pre- 
sented, while the subject is held forth in a materialistic point of 
view. There would be a belt of country, nearly or quite one hun- 

56 



dred miles long, and from two to ten miles broad, where the prac- 
tically ualimitcd vision might always rest upon the crystal-capped 
waves of a green sea, and the dim stretches of distant islands to 
tho southward; the misty, undulating outlines of the pine-clad 
hills, far to the northward; the curving sweeps of placid bays to 
the eastward or the westward, and a continuous park everywhere 
around, green with rich grasses, graced here and there by stately 
groves, and dutteJ ever3'where along its front by beautiful little 
cities, growing towns, and thousands of elegant summer and win- 
ter villas. 

The beauty of this country would be so developed by cutt'ng 
away tho growth, which in many places shuts olf the sea view, 
checks the sweep of the Gulf breeze, and replaces the natural 
verdure of the ground by a brown coating of dead leaves, that 
it would become famous at once as one of tho fairest spots in 
all our broad land. Soon i'. would become crowded with popula- 
tion ; and large areas of land, which are now purchasable at almost 
Government prices, would rise to a comparatively fabulous iigure 
in values. Apparently, the cost of cleiring the surface would be 
paid by the cord wo id which this growth would yield. 

Bellefontaine is a lovely part of this district, lying at a point 
intermediate between the bays of Biloxi and Pascagoula. Here 
the surrounding country is fortunately being beautified by felling 
of the pine forests. 

On the western side of Pascagoula Bay lies the little village of 
West Pascagoula. Here are located the extensive creosote works 
of the Louisville & Nashville Eailroad Company. The process of 
creosoting timbers, having been already described frequently and 
at considerable length in the press, will not be herein repeated. 
The thorough saturation of the timber by creosote prevents the 
attacks of the " Icredo navalis " to such posts and piles as are used 
in railroad bridge building across the salt arms of the sea, and also 
preserves the wood against the ravages of time, and all the bridges 
on this division of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad are con- 
structed out of timber treated by this process. There are some 
extensive saw-mills in West Pascagoula, one of the cluster of 
the center of lumber manufactories in Mississippi. 

Leaving West Pascagoula, the course of the train lay along a 
sort of stone, shell, and sand causeway across the marsh delta of 

57 



the Pascagoula river, -which might be likened to a little miniature 
of the great delta of the Mississippi. The main channel of the 
Pascagoula river itself was crossed on a fine modern iron railroad 
bridge, containing a wide draw in the center to admit of the pass- 
age of a great commerce from the interior. 

Stopping at the station on the east side of the bay our party 
again found themselves on. historic ground. On this peninsula, in 
February or March, 1699, the first boat's crew of Iberville's col- 
onial fleet landed. They chased and captured an old Indian 
squaw, who, after the usual traditional terrifying and modification, 
more fortunate than her red-skinned sisters of the Sabine river, 
in Louisiana, five hundred miles to the westward, was allowed 
to depart in unmolested joy to show her envious gossips the won- 
derful trinkets and treasures that had come from the "great white 
canoes." The French colonists, proceeding a little further, capt- 
ured an old sick Indian. He was left in a blanket, temporarily, 
near their camp fire. During the absence of the party the dead 
pine-straw took fire. The venerable savage was too ill to move, 
so he went to the happy hunting-grounds in the shape of roast 
red-skin. 

These Indians were found to be of the tribe Pascagoula, or 
"bread-eaters." If this general termination signify the same, 
the savages of this section were somewhat given to gustatorial 
accomplishments, as wo have not only the Pascagoulas, but the 
Ponchatoulas, the Bayagoulas, the Tchapitoulas, and other tribal 
branches of chronically hungry aborigines. 

The French selected Old Biloxi, or modern Ocean Springs, as 
the site of their colony, though they very soon after their landing 
established a large colony at Pascagoula. 

Before the day of the railroad and during the era of the Mis- 
sissippi Sound fleets, the old town of Pascagoula, chartered in the 
year 1836, was the center of population for this immediate region. 
When the railroad between New Orleans and Mobile was built, 
the center of population was drawn around the depot on the east 
bank of Pascagoula river, a little more than a mile from the sea, 
and the thriving town of Scranton was founded. 

Scranton, a live, promising, and growing town, now con- 
tains between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred inhabitants. 
It has two or three hotels, many fine boarding-houses, one of the 

58 



best newspapers in the State of Mississippi, the Pascagoula Demo- 
crai-Siar, edited by Captain P. K. Mayers, the extensive Mayberry 
Canning Factory, and several lumber-manufacturing and ship- 
building establishments. 

The town of rfcranton is the capital or county-seat of Jackson 
county. The court-house, about two hundred yards south of the 
railroad depot, is a large and handsome brick edifice, one of the 
best structures of its kind in the State. Mayor S. E. Thompson 
and other officials and citizens of the town state that the popula- 
tion is permanent on account of the industries of the people, and 
that, if anything, it is a little larger in winter than in summer. 
There were many Northerners here last winter, enough to fill 
all of the boarding-houses and hotels. This class of visitors did 
not leave until May, and most of them professed the intention of 
returning this fall and winter. Among the visitors were several 
lumbermen from Minnesota and Michigan. These prospected a 
good deal among the timber lands, and one of them entered four 
sections, while others stated that they would endeavor to change 
their field of operations from the Northern to the Southern forests. 

This is one of the greatest lumber manufacturing districts in 
the South. In a circle of a diameter of five miles are the saw-mills 
of West Pascagoula, Scranton, New Venice, and Moss Point, be- 
sides three shipyards on the banks of the Pascagoula river. The 
rivers here come down to the sea from the very heart of the great 
Southern pine belt, from fifty to one hundred and fifty miles in 
the interior. These are the West river, the Pascagoula, and the 
Escatawba, in Choctaw, or " Little Dog," in English. Of the 
lumber towns. Moss Point alone contains nine large saw-mills, one 
of which is said to have cost a quarter of a million dollars. The 
products of all the mills are towed out by powerful tugs, drawing 
schooners and lighters to the harbor off Horn and Ship Islands, 
where they are loaded into seagoing vessels. The shipments of 
hmiber from the port of Pascagoula for the fiscal year ending 
June 30, 1886, were: To foreign ports, 30,383,607 feet; to Ameri- 
can ports, 11,253,157 feet, or a total of 41,636,764 feet. The above 
figures are obtained from the official records of the collector of the 
port. The number of vessels loaded with lumber clearing, during 
the past fiscal year, was one hundred and sixty-four; foreign, 
eighty-four ; and coastwise, eighty. 

59 



Another very lucrative industry followed in Scranton, besides 
the lumber business and the canning of oysters, shrimps, vegeta- 
bles, etc., lies in the large shipments of fish and oysters made 
every fall, winter, and spring to the Northern markets in refriger- 
ator cars. Great quantities of red fish, groupers, snappers, mack- 
erel, trout, and pompano, caught in seines in the sound, or among 
the neighboring islands, are thus disposed of to profitable custom- 
ers a thousand miles away. The local prices for fish are simply 
astonishingly cheap. During a large part of the year, some of the 
nidst choice kinds of the Gulf fish are sold for a cent a pound, and 
large sea trout at only a cent and a half a piece. Good-sized Span- 
ish mackerel command only ton cents apiece, and pompano may 
be had even at loss figures. 

Amid so much abundance, of course, one can be afforded a sur- 
feit of sport of line-fishing. The natives express a good deal of 
disgust that some of the Northern Waltonians, last year, would 
fiddle and fool with the trout and redfish with a plaguey reel, thus 
losing lots of time when they might have been "yanking" them 
out of the water just as fast as they could throw in their hooks. 
Local anglers state that the best fishing seasons are from August 
until November, and from thel^eginning of February until May. 

The duck and snipe shooting is so fine in this locality, daring 
the winter, that the Scrantonians and Pascagoulians contain among 
them probably a larger proportion of amateur sportsmen than the 
population of any of the towns of the Mississippi seacoast. They 
have a strong gun club, and this signifies the fact that, if the game 
is subjected to a few extra vicissitudes in the shooting season, it 
hiis the greater counter-advantage of watchful protection at the 
time when it is most needed. Everywhere in the South the gentle- 
men's gun club is the terror of poachers and reckless law-breakers. 

Enjoying the pleasant companionship of Captain Mayers, the 
•writer .visited the seashore town of East Pascagoula. This was once 
a famous watering-place, in fact one of the most celebrated summer 
resorts in the South, and there is no reason why it should not go far 
beyond its ancient repute. 

In the ante-bellum days Pascagoula contained the most exten- 
sive summer hotel in the South. Fronting the sea it was located 
in a broad and beautiful park seventy acres in extent. The hotel 
was sii hundred and twenty-five feet in length, contained more 

60 



than three hundred rooms, and could comfortably accommodate, 
at one time, more than a thousand guests. It was most liberally 
patronized by wealthy Alabamians or the planting aristocracy of 
the former banner cotton State. In the era of poverty which fol- 
lowed the termination of civil strife, the South was unable to 
patronize its former popular resorts. The great hotel went to 
ruins, and now nothing but the wreck of crumbling foundations 
remains to mark the site where pleasure once owned a summer 
palace in the days of an opulent epoch. In more recent years, 
since the Gulf States have rebuilt their broken fortunes, it became 
more fashionable for Southern summer tourists to seek rest and 
recreation in the more bustling, overcrowded resorts of North- 
ern climes. Their own pleasant watering-places were treated 
with neglect by a new generation of youth, fashion, and beauty. 
Thus, famous old Pascagoula has become a quaint slumbering 
village by the sea, where the wind sighs through the swaying 
boughs of its grand old live-oaks like a sad echo of the thou- 
sand love tales of the long ago breathed under their branches, 
where the roses bend and bloom as but sweet memories of the 
beauties of a regal race of women, and where the waves that break 
on the shore seem to bear the burden of a dirge for a day that is 
forever dead — as if only these could remember there was ever a 
land so famed in song and story as the " Old South." 

Pascagoula has a beautiful location on its live-oak shaded 
shores, with the blue Gulf, dotted with islands, lying before it, and 
the wide winding river washing its western border. Had it 
received as a direct increase the growth it gave to its more modern 
suburbs, or surrounding towns, it would have been quite a city by 
this time. 

"While these towns increase, with their manufacturing interests, 
the future growth of Pascagoula must be more dependent upon its 
popularity as a summer and winter resort, and upon its eligibility 
as a site for large hotels and fine residences. It is very certain 
that if a winter hotel were built on the same scale as the cele- 
brated ancient summer hotel of Pascagoula, it would receive a 
very liberal patronage from the North. It can now accommodate 
three or four hundred people. In live years it may be made to 
accommodate as many thousands. 

The agricultural resources of the region around these towns are 
61 



comparatively well developed. Truck farms are cultivated, whence 
large shipments of early vegetables are made Northward every 
sprii]g; and summer vegetables are grown to supply the neighbor- 
ing canning factories. Some of the enterprising land owners are 
doing a very wise thing. They are clearing away the pine forests 
and planting pecan groves- in their places. This whole seacoast 
seems to be well adapted to the growth of these beautiful and very 
valuable trees. All thelruits indigenous to this region (v/hichhave 
been mentioned in preceding articles of this series) thrive well in 
the country around Pascagoula. 

The writer who described Pascagoula and said nothing about 
the mysterious music, welling from the depths of its wonderfully 
melodious burg and river, would be deemed behind the age. Those 
who have gone before in this business have drawn liberally on 
their fancy, and one must hesitate before he accepts as final any 
of these highly-embellished legends about immolated chieftains 
and immersed maidens. It is wonderful that any man would be 
willing (o try his hand at that style of literature after Tom Moore's 
inimitable description of the fate of the fire-worshipers on the 
headland of Oman and the mermaid-lulled sleep of the maiden 
Hinda beneath the green wave. This sad music of the sea has 
been heard by many a race for many an age. It comes in the wild 
wail of Oceanidce, who, with tossing arms and heaving breast, 
bemoaned the fate of Prometheus chained to his sea-girt rock, with 
his vitals torn by vultures because he dared to flinch the intellect- 
ual fire which illuminated the minds of the very gods and the very 
goddesses he worshiped only as a vain mortal. It is wafted from 
the warm, passionately-sighing breath of the Lorelie, as, with 
shining tresses of gold, white, twining arms, and rich, clinging 
lips, she draws the sinking mariner down, down, down to a 
death which those who have been rescued from drowning, after 
pain and consciousness have fled, have called a glorious, rapturous 
dream. 

It was heard by Ulysses, who, honoring his loyal mate, stuflTed 
cotton in his ears to keep out the voices of the syrens, when if he 
had lived in these modern times he would have found it just as 
easy to hush their music by trading back the same kind of tafly. 

On many shores and islands are found to-day the strange sing- 
ing sands, and in many parts of the sea, for two thousand years, 

62 



have been heard by men the weird music that rises in the lonely 
nights of Pascagouhi. 

Amateur naturalists say that the mysterious music of Pasca- 
goula comes from a vast multitude of fish ot the drum species, to 
which the croaker, the drum, the redfish, and other varieties of 
the "gill-grinders" of tlie Gulf belong, whose drumming produces 
a monotonous hum, which is heard on still nights or when the 
schools of fish are unusually numerous. At times that same music 
may bo heard among the islands or from the bays in other parts of 
the Gulf of Mexico. 

From Scranton, the Louisville & Nashville Kailroad takes a 
direct north-eastern course, leaving the waters of Mississippi 
Sound, and running through a beautiful pine forest. This forest 
is gradually disappearing; the immense saw-mills located on the 
line are reducing it to merchantable lumber in a variety of forms, 
which are shipped to the principal markets of this country. Grand 
Bay, St. Elmo, and Venetia, are the principal stations between 
Scranton and Mobile. Just before reaching Mobile, the road 
crosses Fowl river, and passes near Frascati, a noted resort for the 
people of Mobile. Here, the lino tends toward Mobile Bay; a 
beautiful view of that bay is presented, together with the shipping 
industries of Mobile. Of this city and its surroundings and attrac- 
tions, both as a commercial center and health resort for Northern 
tourists, much could be written, but we have not time to take up 
an}' further description of this coa^t than already given; it is des- 
tined to become the winter home of the Northerner. 



-y^ 




63 



HOW TO REACH 

THB QULF COAST. 



The Gulf Coast, herein described, lying between Mobile 
and New Orleans, is on the New Orleans and Mobile Divis- 
ion of the Louisville & Nashville Eailroad, and is reached 
only by this line. This great North and South trunk line, 
with its southern terminal at New Orleans, runs north- 
eastwardly to Mobile and Montgomery, thence almost di- 
rectly North through Calcra, Birmingham, Decatur, and 
Columbia to Nashville, Tenu. From this point it branches, 
running to the North-east and North-west : through Louis- 
ville to Cincinnati, and through Evansville to St. Louis. 

At Louisville and Cincinnati connections are made with 
through-car lines from and to all Northern and Eastern 
cities. At Evansville and St. Louis connections are made 
with through-car lines from and to all Northern and West- 
ern cities. 

Two through Express Trains ar,e run daily its entire length 
between Cincinnati, Louisville, Evansville, St. Louis, Mont- 
gomery, Mobile, Chattahoochee, Pensacola, and New Or- 
leans, passing this beautiful Gulf Coast en route. Trains are 
comprised of Pullman's finest Buffet Sleeping Coaches, ele- 
gant passenger and smoking cars, baggage, express, and mail 
cars. In addition to this service, the Louisville & Nashville 
Eailroad runs lines of Pullman Buffet Sleeping Coaches 
from its northern terminals to Memphis, Knoxville, Thom- 
asville, Jacksonville, Pensacola, De Funiak Springs, etc. 

You will not regret choosing the old reliable L. & N. 
when contemplating a trip to any point South. 

C. p. ATMORE, Gen. Pass. Agent, Louisville, Ky. 




X' Q jf J, C It ^ 1 




'"nr 



/fef. 



The Great Through. Car Line bet^veen t Yiq North aod South. 




Unrivaled in Speed, Con^stmction, ai:id Eq^iipnrient. 



HBRARY OF CONGRESS 




!ii 




